The second world slaughter ended with the world being divided up amongst the triumphant imperialist thieves. The famous photo showing Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin, smiling and satisfied in Yalta in February 1945, is the most eloquent symbol of this. Two areas in particular drew their attention, because of their potentially critical importance for “painlessly” opening up a new cycle of accumulation: central Europe (and Germany in particular) and the Middle East. The former would be divided in two and occupied by the victorious armies for fear of the revolutionary uprisings of the early post-war period repeating themselves (a similar “division”, this time of a more political-ideological nature, was made in Italy, where Togliatti’s “communist” party with its affiliations to Moscow and the newly-fledged, US-affiliated Christian Democrats literally shared out the territory, inside and outside Parliament); in the latter were planted the stakes of the new state of Israel, acting as the local police force and bound hand and foot to western imperialisms (but not only: the first State to recognize its existence, after having made active efforts to support its foundation and having provided the financing for arming it, was, not by chance, Stalin’s Russia) (1).
This balance of power more or less held (there was never any lack of contrasts and contradictions) until very recently. Then the pressure from the crisis of over-production of goods and capitals that exploded in the mid nineteen-seventies, blew it to bits and now pockets of tension are multiplying, explosive materials are accumulating: in Europe at the level of trade war (for the moment); in the Middle East (and in the whole stretch of territory running from the Maghreb to India) at the level of an increasingly acute social crisis. In the last two years we have devoted a lot of space to what is going on in the latter area, of such central importance for energy and for strategic reasons to the “imperialist world order”: the revolts in the countries of the southern Mediterranean (originally of proletarians, then channelled by local bourgeois and petit-bourgeois factions into the dead-end of claims for democratic changes of régime) are proof of this on-going critical importance, in the same way as the imperialist intervention in Libya (aiming both at “punishing the tyrant of the day” and at breaking up a potential class front in the whole area) and the bloody war that is still being fought in Syria (with devastating effects on the civilian populations, on the proletarian and proletarianized masses, not only Syrian but Lebanese, Palestinian, Turkish, Jordanian). Lastly, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been dragging along its bloody path for decades, with the massacre of whole generations of Palestinian proletarians caught in cross-fire from all the States (Israeli and Arab) and paralyzed by recurring and poisonous national ideologies.
When, at the dawn of the last decade of the nineteen hundreds, the (fully capitalist) East-block collapsed, everyone sang the praises of a peaceful and prosperous future.Since then armed warfare has become more frequent and more destructive and, from recession to recession, the trade war has become increasingly intense – the war of all against all, that is none other than the normal condition, even in times of peace, of the capitalist régime, founded on the violent extortion of plus-value from proletarian plus-labour, on competition and rivalry, on the inevitable creation of monopolies and multinationals destined to devour the small fry and on the clash between States for economic and political hegemony.
The winds of war can only blow even harder in the near future. The illusion of returning to an idyllic past of peace and goodwill amongst men is a vain illusion: that past has never existed. Proletarians must realize this, as the crisis attacks their lives so furiously, destroying, one after the other, the illusions artfully created since the second world war to paralyze and deviate any antagonistic temptations: stability, progress, better living conditions, “lasting peace”, a “future for our children”, thewelfare state, “paradise on earth” (before the one in heaven; politicians, priests and policemen always go arm in arm – when the first two no longer suffice, the latter come onto the scene).
What is being prepared instead is a future of war. The capitalist mode of production knows no other way of attempting to solve its own contradictions when they reach the point of no return. The two world wars show this with spine-chilling clarity in their warning signs and their dynamics, if only we can shake off misleading, crossbreed ideologies, commonplaces and metaphysical illusions. The increasingly critical importance of areas like the Middle East can act as the fuse that sets off the explosion: over more than a century and a half of colonialism and imperialism (2) there have been too many entangled interests in those devastated lands. And the explosion, when it comes, will not drag the umpteenth local war in its wake, but will be the trumpet call for the start of the third world slaughter – unless the proletariat comes out onto the field first, armed with its theoretical and practical weapons and determined to end the régime of death and oppression once and for all.
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Today this future (of war and suffering) is being prepared on a material level through the increasingly intense exploitation and worsening life quality of wide sectors of the proletarian and proletarianized masses and, on an ideological level, through the myths of reformism, pacifism, democratism, destined to converge and become manifest in the poisons of nationalism, which will become more and more widespread, subtle and lethal.
The strangled and battered masses of Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Jordan, the Lebanon, Iraq, Iran (not forgetting the multi-ethnic proletarians of Israel, still infected or controlled by the ruling ideology of a theocratic State, yet still crushed under the iron heel of capitalism), with their constant, admirable and equally desperate will to fight against oppression, need active support (determined, open, intolerant towards any “bargaining”, indifferent to the “needs of the country’s economy”) from the proletariat of the capitalist metropolises, that have too long been caged in by parties and trade unions ranged on the side of the status quo. And, in turn, in their daily battles today as in the uprisings of tomorrow, they all need the presence alongside them and at their head, of the international communist party, their guide and organizer – without which any revolt is in vain, any rebellion is destined to be paralysed in the end. An awareness must take root in their minds and in their hearts that, as long as there is capital, there is no desirable peace and no war that is less than infamous.
(1)It must be remembered that Japan too remained “under guardianship” for several years, after the end of the war.
(2)Of course, the panorama of critical areas does not stop here. We must not forget the seaboard going from India to Japan, with the eternal shoreline and island disputes; nor whole areas of Africa, where the main imperialist powers (U. S., France, Germany, China…) increasingly come up against each other, either directly or by proxy. The deepening of the economic crisis will not only aggravate already existing conflicts: it will multiply the number and topography of critical areas.
International Communist Party
