The umpteenth, ferocious massacre of Palestinian proletarians by Israeli imperialism, with the active and self-interested compliancy of the Arab bourgeoisies (represented first and foremost by Hamas and the Palestinian National Authority) and by European and US imperialisms, confirms once again, with bombs and bloodshed, that capitalism is war.
It is unceasing trade war and unceasing military war: have we already forgotten Syria and Lebanon, Yemen, Mali and Tigray, an Africa prey first to the colonialists and then to the imperialists, a Middle East that has been a bloodbath for decades, Afghanistan, India, Pakistan - to quote only a few examples?
And it is also unceasing pro-war propaganda, preparation for war. One may smile at the military vessels sent into the English Channel by Great Britain and France to protect fishing rights, or at the constant, renewed arm-wrestling between Turkey and Greece, or the recurring trials of strength by the Chinese and Japanese navies in the South and Eastern China Sea. But only the incurably obtuse would fail to see as many military drills in these events, involving powerful armies, based on huge economic interests and dating back to decade-long political clashes, which may change into the Sarajevo of the third millennium with a fuse lit to set off a worldwide explosion.
Indeed, armaments are not goods destined to remain in the warehouses and are not meant to become obsolete: like any other commodity they must be incremented, consumed, reintegrated. From year to year Italian military expenditure merely grows: a recent decision raises it to 24.97 billion dollars for 2021, with a growth rate of ‘8.1% compared to 2020 and 15.7% compared to 2019 (data provided by Mil€x, the observatory on Italian military expenditure), and what has determined the increase is the purchase of new systems of weapons. Something a bit different from the Recovery Plan! It is the same worldwide. Data from SIPRI (the International Peace Research Institute in Stockholm) on military expenditure in 2020 demonstrates this with dazzling clarity: Italy, + 7.5% compared to 2019; Germany, + 5.2%; South Korea, + 4.9%; United States, +4.4%; France, + 2.9%; Great Britain, + 2.9%; Russia, + 2.5%; India, + 2.1%; Japan, + 1.2%, and so on... The incurably obtuse shut their eyes and cover their ears.
Capitalism is war, the struggle for supremacy on the world market! War does not just represent the natural fruit of capitalism - a fruit that is particularly poisonous to the proletariat, which serves as cannon fodder - necessary from time to time in order to restore vitality to an economy which, once it has lost the explosive thrust produced by post-war reconstruction, sinks yet again into the mire of over-production. Capital lives as a function of war, to the same extent that it is functional to growth in profits and its own survival. And so the hotbeds of war multiply: as soon as one seems to die down, another two or three flare up. A glance back over the seventy-five years that separate us from the end of the second world slaughter is sufficient to see this. The main ingredient of this unrelenting state of affairs is thus the preparation for war, in which the bourgeoisies of all national states are constantly involved.
It is a preparation that is carried out at different levels. Mainstream ideology, through all available channels (schools, the press, the media, the family, churches of all faiths, politics at all levels, everyday language), does nothing but vehicle images of war, bringing it close up even when it declares it is “pacifist”, getting us used to it: let us just remember the dynamics that have developed throughout this year of pandemic, with “curfews” and appeals to “obedience”, the virus as the enemy to fight, the recourse to soldiers in various uniforms and so on. Believe-obey-fight: how topical Mussolini’s slogan has become!
The appeal to “national unity” has become more frequent and determined and prepares the long arm of the union sacrée which, in two world wars (and the infamous wars that immediately followed), allowed the slaughter of entire populations in the name of the “threat to the fatherland”, the “fight against the barbarians”, the “bringing of democracy”, the elimination of the “enemy of the moment” (a business partner right up to the moment before!)… Nationalism in all its forms, democratic as well as sovereignist (two sides of the same coin: class domination), fills the pages of the newspapers and computer screens, mobile phones and televisions. But it is not only a matter of language. In every country an enormous effort is being made (and here, too, the approach of a war extending beyond the local can be felt) to provide the proletariat with the illusion of a welfare state to be defended tooth and nail against its enemies: this has been clearly evident in the passage from the puppet Trump (“America First”) to the puppet Biden (the “New New Deal”), both committed to exalting the Nation and the State as sources of well-being for everyone and as such potentially under threat and thus to be defended. To these ends the proletariat must not just be repressed and disciplined: it must also be bought off, placed in such desperate conditions that it will have to sell itself to the Nation and the State.
The tragic events in the Middle East (the periodical surge of bloody destruction) are examples of all this: on both sides, we have a proletariat that is held hostage as a mass to be manoeuvered by interests that are not its own, glorified and defended by religious factions, a mass for whom signing up to them is the only means of survival and of supporting entire families deprived of any other means of support. The bloody events that periodically recur in the area and so afflict the impotent fine souls are the practical form taken by the proletariat’s tragic fate under arms: the creation of mercenaries, robot assassins, for whom the army is equivalent to the State and the Nation and, consequently, guarantees a minimum of Social Welfare.
All this stands as an emblem of the difficulties the proletariat will have to face in order to break any form of subordination to the State and the ruling class. The Palestinian proletarians will have to shake off the bastard nationalist ideology that for decades has been sending them to the slaughter, often (dis)armed with sticks and stones, for the mirage, renewed eternally on the piles of corpses and rubble, of a Homeland that would savagely exploit them just like any other national capitalism. Israel’s composite proletariat (Jewish, Arab-Israeli, immigrants from Africa and from the Indian sub-continent) will have to take battle against the State which is already squeezing them alive like any other bourgeois State, refusing any obscene religious, ideological, political and military blackmail and standing without hesitation alongside the battling Palestinian proletariat. But above all, it is the task of the proletariat in Europe and America to make a move forward: to move beyond the widespread fear and passivity and make a clean break once and for all with its own bourgeoisie, and with the illusions spread abroad by reformists of all types, unions and politicians, right-wing or “left”, to move towards the fight and towards an international proletarian front that finally has the objective of abolishing nations and fatherlands.
Class struggle will come up again against all these barriers: national, ideological, ethnic, religious, economic. It will have to overthrow them and direct its arms against the only true enemy: the capitalist mode of production.
We communists are not pacifists. To avoid the umpteenth world conflict that is being prepared, war must be declared on all bourgeoisies, and first and foremost one’s own bourgeoisie, returning to the practice of revolutionary defeatism in all its forms: the active and militant refusal to identify with a national unity that claims to stand above social classes.
Yes, this is a hard and rocky path to climb, partly because the weight of the counter-revolution that has oppressed us for so many decades is still paralysing: an authentic millstone. But proletarians should know that, as always, we communists are at their side in the inevitable class war. Which will have to flare up and spread unless we want to end up once again in the monstrous meat grinder of a third world war.
June 2021
