The events that have been going on for months at the heart of Europe – Crimea’s detachment from Ukraine and its fake-democratic joining to Russia, tension on the border between the two States with consequent deployment of armies, the political and media clamour from all sides surrounding these events – show that under the pressure of the economic crisis the bourgeoisie is more and more frequently resorting to a card it knows only too well: that of nationalism.
For us communists, the “national issue” has been over for some time: since 1871 in Europe (the national armies of Prussia and France suspending military operations and joining forces to crush the revolutionary proletariat of the Paris Commune); in the rest of the world about halfway through the 1970s (the conclusion of the cycle of “national and anti-imperialist liberation movements”, from Algeria to Vietnam and Angola to Mozambique). At the same time, the two world wars concluded with the world being re-mapped (the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 and the Yalta conference in 1945, to be precise) for the convenience and benefit of the triumphant imperialisms: thus, by leaving all the knotty problems unsolved, the pre-conditions were established for future tension and a new world war in the future, when economic and social conditions would dictate it. The disintegration of the “Soviet” Union between the late ‘80s and the early 1990s (at the end of a “cold war” that was a war between imperialisms) completed… the work. And so, for some time now, under constant pressure from the economic crisis, we have been witnessing a process ofBalkanization with its most evident critical area in and around the Mediterranean (but not only: other fault lines run along the coasts of the Far East, between India, the Indo-Chinese peninsula, China and Japan).
As we were already writing in 1952-3, Europe is a jungle of nationalisms. It always has been and is becoming increasingly so today: on all sides non-existent “national issues” are put forward, nationalist movements are fuelled, nationalism is hailed as the logical continuation and crowning glory of the democratic, bourgeois principles of “Liberté, égalité, fraternité”. Over the arc of a good sixty years or so, the world dominated by capital has turned full circle and has come back to its starting point once more, together with all its inter-imperialist contrasts and thus the pre-condition for the two world massacres: the USA, Russia, France (joined now by the Asian area with potentially even more devastating effects), the fictitious states drawn up on paper by the victors,revanchism and patriotic rhetoric. The mystifications carried out by those who dominated the whole of the second post-war period is also becoming increasingly evident: the USA as “guarantors of world peace”, Russia as the “home of socialism”, Europe “on its way to unification” … all mystifications that have continued to hide true reality from the eyes of proletarians (who meanwhile were labouring at the fast and furious extraction of plus value for all those decades, right up to the saturation of the markets in the crisis of over production of goods and capitals): i.e. that it has always been a case of competing imperialisms, that the “pax americana” was the premise for new wars (fought far from Europe up to now but over the last few decades closer and closer to the heart of the continent), that Russia is an imperialist capitalism like all the others, that a united Europe is and always has been a fictitious unit, that Germany continues to be the main hinge for all European economic and political dynamics… (1).
Now, after weeks of tension, the situation in the Ukraine seems to be heading towards a prolonged period of stalemate that does not exclude sudden aggravation. We shall be returning to this subject, showing the origins and developments of the situation; just as we shall be returning once again to the scenario of simmering (and bloody) unrest extending from Libya to Egypt and Syria, with the constant stream of massacres of populations caught in the trap of imperialisms and nationalisms. Everywhere, the contrasts that the two world wars have left unsolved (and that are impossible to solve within the capitalist mode of production) are once again becoming the premises for the next world bloodbath.
In all this, the proletariat has not let its own voice be heard. Crushed by the economic crisis, abandoned to itself after the historical destruction of its own communist party ninety years ago now, it suffers blows and counter-attacks that are increasingly violent. But the insistence with which the various bourgeoisies, allied or momentarily on opposite sides, wave the national banner (with macabre cynicism even making use of the hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of the first world war for their purpose) distinctly shows that what they are really terrified of is the possible re-awakening of the proletariat. The virus of nationalism has to prepare the ground for the future deployment of forces but above all it serves to weaken any vain hope of ideological and material independence by a proletariat that has up to now been disoriented and passive.
The class revival, pushed by the growing pressure of the crisis, will necessarily have to pass through the recovery of one of the keys to a revolutionary perspective and one that we shall be giving ample space to, providing theoretical and historical documentation: the proclamation and practice ofrevolutionary defeatism, both on an economic and social level (refusal to make any sort of sacrifice for the “Fatherland”) and on a political one (refusal to consider the proletarians of other nations as enemies and to support the war effort of the “domestic” bourgeoisie). But this will only be possible and must be possible by making the International communist party stronger and more deeply rooted in the world’s proletarian class.
(1) And, in perspective, military as well: not by chance, while we are writing (end of March), Germany is sending, for the first time, forces to the Baltic Countries and Poland – a fact that speaks by itself and sets the basis, as did many other facts which followed in these weeks, for precedents from which it will be difficult to step back.
