They just don’t know which way to turn!

Two years ago, at the time of Barack Obama’s investiture as President of the United States, we wrote – to sum up briefly – that only a sucker could believe such a position would serve any interests other than those of big capital, with all the inevitable internal contradictions that it generates [1].    Two years have gone by and we all know the economic and social situation in the United States: soaring unemployment, the same trend in the public debt, production mechanisms jammed, commercial war all over the international chess board, clear and growing protectionist trends, industrial policies that heavily penalize the working class (at GM, the unions have accepted drastic salary cuts), an overall sense of discomfort and disillusion… Right in the middle, generous, billion-dollar transfusions for banks and corporations in the (vain) attempt to save the former and re-launch the latter; a health reform that is laughable in its pathetic attempt to stick a miserable patch (in favour of a petit bourgeoisie on the way to becoming proletariat) over one of the most macroscopic black holes in US capitalism; a war (in Afghanistan) that is continuing and another (in Iraq) that seems to be everlasting, which together keep military spending up and fuel the state of  fear and alarm; growing pressure on a mixed and already hard put to proletariat, though “privileged” compared to other sectors of international proletarians; and after this… words… words… words, immersed in the syrup that is so pleasing to the various “lefts” in the various countries, from re-varnished social-democrats to “extra-parliamentaries” wagging their tails and begging to return as “parliamentaries”.

For their own part the “experts” (the Krugmans, the Roubinis, the Stiglitzes, the “right-wingers” just as the “left-wingers”, liberals and conservatives) struggle vainly to find answers in the foul-smelling litter of their ideology, all of them more or less united in regarding what is happening and above all what may happen, with concern, all trapped in the false “liberist-state” alternative, incapable of grasping that a) it is not a case of two opposing “recipes”, one better (and for whom?) than the other, but two strategies that capital has always turned to, ever since its advent, to ensure its own dominion and the continuity of its mode of production, and that b) in any case, since the end of the second world conflict (which was supposed to have got rid of “totalitarianism” in the name of political and economic democracy), it has been the “owner-State” (entrepreneur, creditor, centralizer, as well as thug) that has dominated the scene, no matter the liberist rhetoric vomited at one time or another by one man (or woman) of straw, Reagan or Thatcher, interpreters of a laissez faire now rejected by history, but always ready to put themselves in the hands of the State to try and disentangle economic knots that are, in actual fact, impossible to unravel. This is what the expertise of the bourgeois world’s experts boils down to.

Obviously all this does not regard the United States alone: but, as always, the “American model” is transferred everywhere in exactly the same form.Everywhere chaos and collapse, inability to find solutions, blind navigation, bombastic statements and a little practical coasting, scandals large and small to create a smoke screen so that reality is forgotten – and the train charging faster and faster towards the cliff-edge [2].  The only thing the ruling class is capable of doing in this totally disastrous situation is what it has always managed to: tighten the chains on the proletarians, make them work harder (to “be more competitive on the world markets”), wring them dry in every possible way (wages, working hours, pace of work, pensions), fuel divisions inside their ranks (the immigrants! the sans-papiers! the terrorists!), beat them up every time they dare raise their heads (and in any case proceed to militarize society in general), knowing quite well that it has close, historical allies in the great institutional trade unions (and the little, aspiring ones) and in the parties and mini-parties that share a heritage lasting eighty years now of constant betrayals of the working class.

The economic crisis we are in the middle of cannot be reversed by capital, except by the classical method:  preparing for a new world war.  All the measures adopted in the past few years have not only proved insufficient to get capital out of a crisis cycle that began in the mid-‘70s – they have created the premises for other collapses and catastrophes even more profound and devastating than the ones that preceded them: we have documented and demonstrated this and shall not refrain from doing so, as the crisis develops [3].

Let us remember what communism has argued from the very beginning: “In commercial crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity — the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.” (Marx-Engels, Communist Manifesto, Chap. I: Bourgeois and Proletarians).

So they just don’t know which direction to take.  Instead, we communists know where they are heading.  We know that the crisis will deepen and become even more catastrophic, until the objective conditions are created for forcing the various capitalisms (and the States that represent and defend them) to clash in the war of all against all, securing the alliances that are in their interests at the given moment, breaking them and recreating them [4]  – but always and above all agreeing in their repression of any proletariat that refuses to subordinate itself to the supreme interests of its own bourgeoisie and the national economy it represents.

However, we also know that the proletariat will not remain a passive witness to all this.  We leave the petit bourgeoisie, grown increasingly nasty, to their theories on the “disappearance of the proletariat”, its “inexistence” and “incapability of reacting” (and on the many other “subjects” that are supposed to have taken its place: the “masses”, the “networks”, the “citizens”, the “temporaries”, the multi-coloured pre- and post-electoral carnival turns, all expressions of the parasitic half-classes terrorized by the possibility of slipping down into the proletariat and above all by the prospect of a revolutionary outcome).  We shall leave them to the neurotic chase after “new recipes” which are as old as capitalism itself,  after “new myths” that are already frustrated as soon as they appear (from the “first black president in American history” to the “first “trade-union president in the history of Brazil”, from neo-labour in Italian-Apulia sauce to the anti-capitalist neo-populism that finishes by setting up convergences between right and “left” which are not so paradoxical after all).

We know, thanks to a historical theory and historical experience, that – on reaching a certain limit – the exploited masses can do none other than rebel (the ruling class itself, everywhere, knows this and prepares for it).  They will do so in sudden explosions, at times uncontrollable.  And through these rebellions they will realize that spontaneous outbursts are not enough: that something more is necessary – organization, connection, coordination, continuity, autonomy, direction – both immediate and long term.  They will experience the need for all this.  And they will find it in the revolutionary party which has proved capable of fighting with them, unceasingly (even when it was ignored and apparently relegated to the sidelines) guiding them and organizing them, alerting them to enemies and false friends, revealing deception and traps, and above all proclaiming loud and clear, at all times, whilst showing the historical inevitability of it step by step, the need for the supreme battle: the fight to seize power against the capitalist State, to establish their own dictatorial power, the only possible way to reorganize (worldwide) a society that has for so long been immersed in decay and degradation, suffering, hunger and war.

International Communist Party