Texts

As we write, news come of the umpteenth possible truce in the State of Israel’s tragic war (lasting since 1948!) of extermination and ethnic cleansing in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Lebanon and the „Syrian“ Golan Heights. Of course, we shall return to the content of this possible truce and above all to its successive developments, without launching into the only too foreseeable merry-go-round of geo-political analyses and and hypotheses.  But some things should continue to be clear.  Whatever the immediate outcome of this bloody situation, another poisoned fruit of imperialist dynamics, it is evident that there will be no release, whether political, military or humanitarian.

In the metropolises of the States of older capitalism as well as in those of younger capitalism and in the peripheries of the whole capitalist world, the economic, living and working conditions of wage workers (and, subordinately, of the declining half classes and the proletarianized masses) continue to worsen, with generalized and constant increases in the cost of basic necessities, including housing, gas and electricity.

Everywhere, the restructuring of economic enterprises (multinationals, individually- or family-owned, cooperatives, state-owned, nationalized or of any other "business name"), induced by the irrepressible crisis of overproduction, generates more and more unemployment and precarious workers, and increasingly forces women back into the home, in underpaid work for the family, together with a more and more unsustainable increase in working hours and pace of work – the first and only cause of the growing number of homicides, serious traumatic injuries and illnesses in the workplace.

As young proletarians from the banlieues angrily faced up to the cream of the French Republic’s repressive regime during recent riots, an aging and green-behind-the ears protester held up a banner featuring the slogan: “Disarm the Police”.

A metaphysically absurd demand.

The State isn’t some kind of body appointed to oversee the “collective good”. It is the “collective capitalist” that exercises the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and underwrites its monopoly of violence.

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)…