The endless massacre of proletarian and proletarianized Palestinian masses, the dead-end chaos in Libya, Syria, Iraq and Ukraine, the total instability of Afghanistan and Pakistan and crucial areas of Central Africa, tens of thousands of deaths everywhere, hundreds of thousands of refugees travelling towards nothing, destruction and devastation: the hotbeds of war are multiplying, extending and deepening under the pressure of a world economic crisis that dictates the re-charting of the political and social geographies arising out of two twentieth-century world wars. It is no longer a question of sporadic local conflicts breaking out here and there: what we are now witnessing are points of no return in a new escalation whose necessary outlet, from the point of view of capital, is a new world bloodbath.
In Versailles in 1919 and Yalta and Potsdam in 1945, with arrogant strokes of the pen and secretly scribbled sketches exchanged under the table, the world was “arranged” according to the convenience of the victorious imperialisms. From the dissolving of the Ottoman Empire, from the carving up of Europe between capitalist blocks with an openly anti-proletarian function, from the need to control key areas such as the Middle East, were born “fake States”, supported by bourgeoisies which, arising out of the establishment of capitalism in these areas – the fruit first of colonial and then imperialist penetration – nonetheless had nothing in common with the bourgeoisies of the 1700s and 1800s that led to the birth of national States, nor with those which, up to the mid 1970s, supported the anti-colonial movements (Algeria, Vietnam, Angola…). These are bourgeoisies born parasitical, emerging from the putrefaction typical of imperialism and by imperialism (in its pseudo-national ramifications) financed and supported. These are States and mini-States founded on the oil rent and thus ready to sell themselves to the highest bidder; lay or religious, according to their necessities and the interests of the moment; fragile and fleeting in their structures and alliances, but always solid and united in the extraction of plusvalue from proletarians from anywhere in the world and merciless in controlling any sign of class autonomy and repressing any attempt at rebellion.
Now these “sketches”, which lasted more or less effectively for decades and decades, have come to pieces, disrupted by the opening of deep faults and by the succession of political and social earthquakes, resulting from the world economic crisis, the overproduction of goods and capitals, the hitches in the mechanism of accumulation. The appearance of these ravines has been accompanied by great proletarian uprisings (Tunisia, Egypt), soon forcefully channelled into the dead ends of democratic and national claims by half classes that have been emerging for some time now but which have already been hit by an unstoppable process of proletarianization. And the worn and now anti-historical accompaniment of democratic-nationalist claims has been joined by that most-powerful means of control and outlet for frustration: religious ideology, in all its forms, from the more subtle and moderate to the most fanatical and “extremist”.
The price for all this, even though the great majority is unaware of it, has been paid by the proletariat – both the local proletariat which is the immediate victim of the explosion of all these “balances” (unstable, like everything else in the world of capital: “all that is solid melts into air”,The Communist Manifesto, 1848), and that of the old imperialist cities still paralyzed by the material drugs of a post-war period experienced under the influence of expansion and boom, by the illusions of progress and democracy and the practice of openly traitorous parties and unions. And as the seismic waves roused by these profound earthquakes spread like ripples, this proletariat appears to be incapable of reacting – intimidated, hypnotized and paralyzed like a rodent faced with the snake that threatens it. Or, if it does react, it does so allowing itself to be enmeshed by nationalist or local demagogies with racist and chauvinist tendencies or by religious sham of every type and origin.
We communists have always worked against the current – ever since theory and praxis have taught us that “the ideas of the ruling class are, in every age, the ruling ideas”. But theory and praxis have also taught us that reality changes constantly due to the joint action of material events and our own intervention in them, however minor and unimportant it may appear for very long periods. Through theory and praxis, we are aware that once a crucial moment and a point of no return have been reached, capital knows no other drastic solution for its crises than war, the “regeneration through destruction” (as the bourgeois ideologists call it) of the excess created by decades of extracting plusvalue. And that the proletarian masses, as they are gradually deprived of any “guarantee”, of any “reserve”, of any hope of placid survival, will be forced to look reality in the eye and shake themselves out of their hypnosis and paralysis. At this stage, however, they will have to encounter their own party, capable of contrasting, both in theory and in practice, not only the ruling ideology (democratic and fascist, lay and religious, pacifist and war-mongering, progressive and nationalist), but all those material forces that have always oppressed the proletariat, the social, political and trade-union forces that have restrained it, the State and its legal and illegal armed wings, thanks to which capital has kept itself in power and has been able to continue undisturbed to extract plusvalue from the daily labour of enormous masses of proletarians, both women and men, for so many decades.
In the perfect awareness that today only a few people listen to us but also that we are doing our revolutionary duty to the full, we tell these proletarian masses that, in order to prevent a new world massacre of dimensions even more alarming than the two previous ones, the only prospect to start working on immediately in its various articulations and applications lies in moving towardsrevolutionary defeatism, the total and cast-iron refusal to take the side of one imperialist front or the other, inevitably destined to clash; in staying totally independent of the State, of the parties and the trade-unions, while organizing for the defence of living and working conditions; in recovering the theoretical and practical arms that have always distinguished the exploited class in its daily guerrilla warfare against capital. But above all, this prospect depends on recovering an understanding of the enormously urgent need to restore and put down worldwide roots for the revolutionary party, our party, the international communist party.
Outside of this prospect, all there can be is merely endless slaughter and unheard-of suffering.
International Communist Party
