For days, months, years, the war in Ukraine, the massacres in the Middle East, Trump’s electoral victory and its immediate consequences, the crisis in Germany and the outcome of its elections, the “advance of the right” more or less everywhere, the realisation of Europe’s political inexistence, the increasingly urgent “debate” over European rearmament and much more have stirred up a bedlam of reflections and interpretations from the most dissimilar to the most inventive: an ideological desert that reduces everything to a clash between “the free world” and “autocracy”, between “progressives” and “oligarchics”, to sum up between Good and Evil – further evidence of the inability to produce a materialist analysis of what is going on.
As should be clear by now to those who follow us, we keep well away from the “puppet shows of political illusion and disillusion“, the “whys and wherefores”, the “dynamics of electoral swings”, all the “…and now what’s going to happen? ”.
The “new world order” imagined by some and feared by others is merely the disorder of an obese and broken-winded capitalism in a critical condition, which has for fifty years been struggling between highs and lows, peaks and troughs without any apparent exit route, apart from preparation for a third world war.
The giddy acceleration immediately imposed by the new US government on domestic and international policies is not the fruit of the President’s and his acolytes’ power mania. Alongside developments in the structural crisis of overproduction of goods, capital and human beings, US imperialism has seen its world dominion progressively eroded in favour of other imperialisms (also in a critical condition), either those rebuilt over time (Germany, Japan…) or those emerging and then fully emerged (China, the BRICS). The clash that we have witnessed between the Russian and Ukrainian armies for three years now, backed up, with varying degrees of economic and military involvement, by the NATO states, is proof of this “resistible rise” of the US imperialist giant [1]. In the midst of it, as always from 1945 onwards, the clay pot of Europe, a mere economic market gasping for breath, marked by centrifugal currents corresponding to the demands of competing national capitalisms – anything but a unified political entity! The “attack on Europe” which we had already identified back in 1949 (see the article of the same name published in our Italian paper at the time, Prometeo, no.13) and which we have written about several times, has never ceased, through all the various phases of the accumulation of capital developing after the destruction of the Second World War; and today it is gathering new strength and new reasons for being, driven as it is by the overall crisis of the capitalist mode of production. It is on this very scenario that a new, worldwide bloodbath is being prepared [2].
We have always relegated the fanciful trend towards seeing History as a product of the “monster” of the moment to its rightful place. The measures announced and enforced by the new US administration which so scandalize and scare the “sensitive souls” of the world’s whining democrats are on the one hand the expression of real national claims by an imperialism that is now ever strong, despite being downsized compared to the scenarios of fifty years previously, and, on the other hand, the effect of demo-reformist policies that prove to be inconclusive and inadequate faced with the persistence of the world crisis, unless in terms that are openly repressive and anti-proletarian. At the same time, these measures demonstrate the unsolvable contradictions in bourgeois recipes for “exiting the crisis”: liberism/protectionism, globalization/nationalism, the eternal cul de sac of inflation-deflation-stagflation etc.. In one way or another, sooner or later, these are the laws of capital (the profit-seeking, the need to restore accumulation, the “golden rule” of competition between national capitals, the law of unequal development…) which assert themselves and present the final reckoning [3]. Credits have to be called in, debts have to be settled: perhaps in the form of precious metals for industry and rare-earth elements… And Europe, with its multiple States and debts contracted over a period of decades, has many debts with the USA, having been, decade after decade, its faithful, if grumpy, subject. Just as States like China, Germany and Japan have credits with the USA…
Meanwhile, and for this very reason, all of them are re-arming because, if these recipes (import duties! the trials of strength both real or imaginary!) fail to work (and we state quite openly that they will not work), well then, it really will be necessary to take up arms and enter the field with unconcealed power, the iron fist. Over all these years the arms industry has never ceased to grow, the international arms trade, in the light of day or clandestinely, has never ceased to operate full speed ahead and all the more or less recent conflicts have seen the giants of the arms industry in the front line on both sides of the battlefronts. The automobile industry is plumetting and the arms industry soaring: there must be a reason for that! There is already talk of converting unsold people-carriers into …tanks.
And so, in poor old, multi-State Europe, squeezed between the USA, Russia and China, talk turns for the umpteenth time to a unified, supra-national armed force: should we expect it to be pulled out of the Mad Hatter’s top hat? We have our doubts: perhaps it will be just a patched-up re-edition of the NATO and will be wrecked on the cliffs of national capitals’ demands; or else it will be the iron heel of the strongest capital, the one that manages to emerge above the chaos and disorder – and then we will, indeed, witness the authentic retransformation of national economies into war economies and can expect the first shots to be fired from one day to the next. Not by chance the new German Chancellor Mertz declares that he wishes to be free of any subordination to the United States and more than one government is starting to worry about…the state of its railways – no secondary consideration in a perspective of preparation for war, as happened at the beginnings of the First and Second World Wars.
What do we need to do, then? What must be be done? What can be done?
For now, the chains that imprison our class, binding it to the forms in which the capitalist mode of production is organised, seem to be indestructable. The institutions through which the bourgeoisie, first and foremost the State, excersises its dictatorship still manage to make out that its particular, class interests also guarantee general interests. With the illusion of a possible social redistribution of the “wealth“ produced by the exploitation of the workforce, with the trick of democratic defence of the conditions by which the workforce is exploited and with all the other ideological artifacts that blur the antagonism between Capital and Labour, the practice of reformism has marked the decades – almost a century! – of counter-revolutionary victory, followed by the defeat of the International Communist Revolution, which could have been unleashed after the triumph of Red October in Russia. In its many, various guises, democratic reform seems to have annihilated to such an extent the strength and antagomism of the international proletariat, wiping out even the desire for a different sort of social organisation and the willingness to fight for it, that the modern class struggle has been led to a point of no return. The Manifesto of the Communist Party warned in 1848 that: “The history of any society that has existed up to now is the history of class struggles. Freemen and slaves, patricians and plebeians, barons and serfs, members of guilds and apprentices, in a word oppressors and oppressed, have always been in contrast, carrying on an uninterrupted fight, at times hidden, at times clearly evident: a fight that always ended either with the revolutionary transformation of the whole of society, or with the ruin of all the classes involved in the fight.”
Despite this, or perhaps just because of this historical awareness, we know that the explosion of the tragic contradictions born out of and in the progression of the capitalist crisis will undermine the economic bases on which reformism has been able to weave its web of lies and oppression. And, first to defend once again its economic conditions in the short term (wages, salaries, pensions…) and its social conditions (housing, health, living conditions in the neighbourhoods, environmental decay…) and later to survive war (as in the Middle East: slaughter at the battlefront, mass killings in the backlines…), our class will be obliged to resume the fight. In the end it is this fight that will train it, perhaps unwittingly, and in any case thanks always to the intervention and under the guidance of the revolutionary party, to question and finally to overthrow bourgeois domination.
We communists work, as we always have done (even in the darkest years of the counter revolution), to allow the modern class war to break down the barriers of bourgeois social relations and push forward to the end: up to the seizing and exclusive exercise of power by the proletariat.
Against the wars of Capital, against the imperialist order of today and tomorrow, against political and economic, ethnic and religious opportunism, against any manifestation of so-called “national socialism”, for the internationalist and anti-national identity and unity of our class, we prepare and practise revolutionary defeatism and armed and militant fraternization – for our own cause and not for that of the Fatherland and the Nation – between proletarians who speak all the langauges of the world.
March 2025
[1] In this regard, we refer readers to our article “The resistible rise of the ignoble ‘free world’”, iThe Internationalist, n.11/2024-2025.
[2] European subordination to the USA is also to be seen, quite simply, in the imitation of Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again” (MAGA), which becomes, thanks to a magnificent idea from our own ideologists!, “Make Europe Great Again” (MEGA)! There really isn’t a lot to choose between MAGA and MEGA!
[3] At Trump’s inauguration ceremony, the fine line-up of industrial magnates (particularly from hi-tech) was interpreted by the press as the coming together of the great names in the US economy to pay homage to the… new Ruler. Or might it not have been rather to remind him who the real bosses are and what script he should be acting out in the years to come?…
