From Cairo's "bread riots" of 1976, to the uprisings in Morocco and Algeria of 1988, both crushed in blood baths, to the more recent anti-IMF riots in Jordan the difficulties of merely staying alive for workers has become more and more dramatic, causing major splits within the capitalist classes from Morocco to Pakistan as to how to deal with this rebellion from below.

Deep divisions have developed within these ruling classes pitting pro-American governments - often consisting of royal dynasties in the Arabian Peninsula - against a new generation of dissidents within their own ranks who, in the name of the Koran, have accused them of being corrupt, of squandering the region's resources and of selling out to the US.

These generalized facts describe the context of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But these facts do not help us understand precisely why the attacks took place in September 2001. My view is that the political factors motivating the mass murder and suicides of September 11 involved the oil industry and globalization in the Arabian Peninsula. Here is the story.

Beginning in 1998 the Saudi monarchy decided to globalize its economy and society beginning with the oil sector. One Western 'expert' described it in the following words, "Keep your fingers crossed, but it looks as if Saudi Arabia is abandoning almost seventy years of restrictive, even unfriendly policy toward foreign investment". The changes constituted, in effect, a NAFTA-like agreement between the Saudi monarch and the US and European oil companies.

The Saudi monarchy "globalized" not because its debt was unmanageable (as was the case with most other countries which bent to the globalizing dictates of the IMF) but because, faced with a intensifying opposition, the King and his circle realized that only with the full backing of the US and European Union could they hope to preserve their rule in the coming years. In other words, confronted with significant social problems and an insurrectional element within its own class, the Saudi Arabian government seems to have decided that a rehaul of its economy would deal a decisive blow to the Islamicist opposition - undermining its ability to recruit converts who would be employed in the upper echelons of a "globalized economy and society" instead of being driven to despair by political powerlessness and unemployment.

Whatever hopes the Islamic opposition in the ruling classes of the Arabian Peninsula had ever harbored of getting their governments to send the American troops packing and turning their oil revenues into the economic engine of a resurgent Islam were facing a historic crisis in the summer of 2001. Without a major reversal, the Islamic fundamentalist opposition would have to face the prospect of a total civil war in their own countries or face extinction. Certain elements of this opposition decided that only a spectacular action like the September 11 hijackings could turn back the tide.

So, not only have thousands been killed as pawns in a power struggle in the ongoing "oil wars" of the Middle East, the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon has brought us back to the political structure that prevailed during the Cold War; that is, a structure where we in the antiglobalization movement have to confront both sides, since neither side represents the interests of working people in any part of the world.

The power of the antiglobalization movement is in its potential to build a real, not simply ideological, political struggle of the world's working people against the plans of globalizing capitalism. Farmers from India, trade unionists from Canada, students from Europe marched, talked and organized together in the great antiglobalization events of the last two years. This increasing unification of people across barriers of all kinds - geographical, religious, gender, political - has challenged the agendas of both the Islamic fundamentalists and the capitalist globalizers.

The suicidal attack on Washington and New York and Bush's response, therefore, are also attacks on the antiglobalization movement because they are both calculated to bring increasing divisiveness and despair within a planetary working class that was beginning to see an alternative reality taking shape. It is crucial that we do not let the war drums and increasing restrictions on civil liberties succeed in erasing the movement's organizing achievements.

** This piece has been put together from parts of a much larger article available at www.thecommoner.org