Texts

“Capitalism is war!” we have always stated, to the scandal of right-thinking people and fine souls. It is enough to look back over three centuries of history for confirmation. Yet we communists are not pacifists. We know quite well (and have always said so, what’s more) that the wars at the beginning of the age of capitalism and for the affirmation of the new class, the bourgeoisie, were not only necessary but also progressive: they plucked humanity from the rule of the old feudal mode of production, which was by then superfluous and destructive, thus allowing it to take an enormous step forward in history. Nonetheless they were wars, with their dead, their destruction, their suffering: and those who celebrate the rule of capitalism in an abstract way as the “best of all possible worlds” must not forget this – the bourgeoisie came into being and imposed its own mode of production amidst bloodshed and by means of weapons, spreading it throughout the world by means of weapons and bloodshed.

The Dallas shooting (the lone gunman who, exasperated by the constant murder of black people by the police, shot 5 police officers) reveals that there are many issues here to reflect upon.

First of all, as we have stated more than once in our newspaper over the past months, referring to the cold-blooded murders by the US forces of repression, the problem is not one of race but of class. Racism is a tool that the ruling class has always used to divide and weaken the proletariat, setting large sectors of the population one against the other. This has happened ever since the abolition of slavery after the American Civil War (1861-1865): the relentless development of capitalism and the creation of a national market needed a scapegoat for social frustration, thus dividing and ruling: white workers against black workers, but also “native” workers against immigrant workers, the white, working-class aristocracy against the “poor whites” and so on. To cite another example, the “divide and rule” carried forward by the British ruling class within the English working classes against the Irish proletariat was no different: we only need read the pages that Marx and Engels devoted to this issue, insisting that the English working class could only have carried out its revolutionary role by freeing itself from anti-Irish prejudice and taking up arms against capital as a single proletarian front united in the struggle. Racism is one of capitalism’s poisonous by-products and this is why we declare openly, using a paraphrase, that “those who don’t want to talk about capitalism, can’t talk about racism”!

And now what will the convenient idiots do on both sides of the ocean (whatever ocean), still convinced as they are that what decides politics (domestic, foreign, economic, social, etc. etc.) is the Man (Woman) sent by Providence, elected every few years or so to the beating of drums and showers of streamers, fireworks and sequins, flag-waving, thirty-four-tooth smiles and handfuls of all sorts of promises, like sweets?

What will the prostrate do, now that the only programme that remains to them is a whining “vote the least objectionable, but vote”, thrashing about in a tormented dilemma of “what have (haven’t) we done? What should (shouldn’t) we have done?” Barely concealing a touch of rancour towards Democracy, so highly praised, by Whom they have been punished (“Ah, how ungrateful! After all we’ve done for you!”)?

“Real” or “fake” as the attempted coup d’état in Turkey and subsequent repression by Erdogan’s government (democratically elected and as such recognized by all the imperialist powers) may have been, one thing is clear: once again the hard material facts of the world economic crisis are making themselves felt within the bourgeois ruling class, too. With different implications and consequences, in Great Britain and in Turkey (to limit ourselves to just a few of the dramatic events opening this summer of 2016), there have been clashes between bourgeois factions in serious difficulty as they try to face up to an economic crisis which, in their countries as elsewhere, risks becoming – and has to some extent already become - social and political.