This is a watershed moment. The economic, social and political crisis has converged with war to make for a situation steeped in uncertainty. Any attempt to decipher the complex web of factors leading to the new scenarios and pinpoint – albeit approximately – the trajectory of events in terms of their inevitably catastrophic outcomes, is fraught with difficulty. After the Second World War, the “Italian” Communist Left made a valuable contribution to the restoration of the staples of revolutionary Marxism and, to help us find our way, we may turn to some of their keys of understanding. One of these touches upon the historical trajectory of the “aggression against Europe”, which was elaborated upon in a 1949 article of the same name, and published in what was then our theoretical organ, Prometeo. The article contained an assessment of the differing relative importance of Russian and American imperialisms.

Since the end of the Second World War (the second imperialist massacre to be more precise), Capital has never ceased to bathe the planet in blood, as well as disrupting it with its poisons and its need for self-valorization.  The list of the greater or lesser wars that have followed suit since then is striking and demonstrates, even just in the black words written and printed alone, that for a long time now its rule has become one long and destructive agony, a bloodbath that grows and spreads year after year.  What is happening in Ukraine is the last “episode” in time: but an “episode” which, because of its dimensions and implications, can only serve as the antecamera to others, up until the outbreak of a third inter-imperialist massacre of worldwide dimensions.

If and when the Russians’ so-called “special military operation” in Ukraine concludes, it will become evident to those who are not content to view reality through the deforming lens of mainstream ideology, that whatever “peace” (armistice? ceasefire? what else?) may come, will merely represent a longer or shorter pause before another chapter opens up in the headlong rush towards a third, inter-imperialist bloodbath.

There’s no going back.

This is certainly not written in the stars or in the psychology of one individual or another, called onto the stage of history to play the part of the ruler of the moment, but in the material reality of the dynamics of the capitalist mode of production.

1949. Only four years had passed since the last act of worldwide butchery, and the furious winds of war were blowing again across Europe. The famous walls had yet to be built, but there were already discussions as to whether the security of New York and San Francisco should be shored up by risking the lives of the German proletariat on the banks of the Rhine or the Elba. Almost eighty years on, the location has changed: will democracy, peace and stars-and-stripes liberty be defended on the banks of the Dnieper or, more modestly, along the European-Atlantic axis from Gdansk to Konstanz? The world eagerly awaits the outcome of the war unleashed in Ukraine: will the endless Russian armoured columns stop in Donets, or will they plough on through to Odessa or Transnistria? Will the Baltic States be attacked? And what of Scandinavia?

The abrupt “withdrawal” from Afghanistan by the United States which, after decades of “exporting democracy” (shady alliances, the financing and training of ambiguous groups and factions: in a word, the precise bases for the present chaos), reveal their own recurrent and equally elusive “vocation for isolationism”.    The pious rush to get out by the western powers which only yesterday were gathering in the country in large numbers to secure “good business” behind the shield of the Stars and Stripes, suddenly find themselves without protection.  The umpteenth proof of the  non-existence of Europe as a united political entity and its being instead a rocky terrain where obscene national egoisms clash and are indeed inevitable in the realm of Capital and Profit. The long arm of China and Russia extending towards a region of extreme geo-political and economic interest, with its rare landscapes, its oil and gas, its talc and, yes, its opium - a precious raw material for general stultification.  The role of bloody slaves played by the clans, the warlords, local bourgeois factions, always ready to put themselves into the hands and hire of one imperialist power or the other and change sides as soon as the wind veers in another direction.  Added to this pretty picture are the other tensions that continue to balloon and explode in the nearby Middle East or which break out in the not so far-away Mediterranean (such as the recent ones between Algeria and Morocco)…

The umpteenth, ferocious massacre of Palestinian proletarians by Israeli imperialism, with the active and self-interested compliancy of the Arab bourgeoisies (represented first and foremost by Hamas and the Palestinian National Authority) and by European and US imperialisms, confirms once again, with bombs and bloodshed, that capitalism is war.

It is unceasing trade war and unceasing military war:  have we already forgotten Syria and Lebanon, Yemen, Mali and Tigray, an Africa prey first to the colonialists and then to the imperialists, a Middle East that has been a bloodbath for decades, Afghanistan, India, Pakistan - to quote only a few examples?

Yet again.  As if moving to the rhythm of an infernal dance, once again the massacre recurs again of our class brothers in Palestine, who for over sixty years now have suffered the rule of the imperialist Israeli bourgeoisie and are further betrayed by the connivance of national fractions of the Arab bourgeoisie and the manipulation of the religious, lay and fake-socialist nationalism of “their” ruling class.

The Utopian ideal of “two peoples, two states”, when the economic structure and dynamics of capital prevent any development independent of the “Israeli” one, proves to be the realisation of the very real Dystopia of a “Palestinian National Authority” that has assumed for itself the role of controlling, managing, organising and selling the labour of hundreds of thousands of Arab-speaking proletarians.

A cynical sort of control which, for the sake of preventing even the slightest hope of even the slightest class independence, does not hesitate to sacrifice thousands of lives on the altar of an impossible and anachronistic “Palestinian fatherland”.

From Libya to Iran, passing through Syria and Iraq, the winds of war are blowing more and more fiercely. Faced with this acceleration in the clashes between imperialist powers, we communists must put forward once more with increasing insistence the only position that can allow the international proletariat to avoid being dragged into an imperialist war again, as unfortunately happened only yesterday in the terrible massacre of the Second World War and the bloodshed of the following postwar period, in which we are still immersed.