With the Israeli attack on Gaza and in Lebanon, the situation in the Middle East has become even more serious (but when was it ever “not serious”?). This shows – if there were still any need to – the blind alley in which the whole area finds itself and which it can never get out of by means of negotiations, peace talks, local or international agreements, pacts or compromises. Meanwhile tension rises in the area ranging from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific, from India to Pakistan, from Korea to Japan. Lastly, the whole of central Africa is opening up even further to inter-imperialist clashes, conducted more or less by proxy. This is a war scenario that drags on, worsens, spreads, watched helplessly by those who were expecting a second post-war period, or post-fall of the Berlin wall, under the auspices of stability and harmony: the “best of all possible worlds” is increasingly the “worst of the real worlds”.
What’s going wrong? What is it that isn’t working?
Let’s out a stop to all the rubbish talked about the eternal evil of humankind, its egoism and appetites! There is only one name for this scenario: capitalism in its supreme phase, that of imperialism, in which the conflict of all against all isinevitable (a conflict which is the reflection, at a strategic-military level, of competition as the soul of commerce) in order to share out a booty which the economic crisis that has been dragging on for thirty years renders day by day more precious and more vital for the very survival of the capitalist mode of production. “Imperialism,” writes Lenin in the work of the same name (1916), which many would do well to go and study, “is thus capitalism that has reached its final stage of development in which the dominion of monopolies and financial capital has taken shape, the export of capital has assumed great importance, the world has started to be shared out between the big international trusts and the share-out of the earth’s surface between the big imperialist nations has already been completed. […] In fact this mad desire not only to conquer agricultural territories but also to get its hands on highly industrialised countries is one of characteristics of imperialism (the lust of Germany for Belgium, of France for Lorraine), firstly because the fact that the land has already been shared out [in the sense that there are no longer “virgin territories” to be explored and annexed to one colonial country or another, ed.] makes it necessary, when a new share-out is going on, to grab any sort of country and, in second place, one characteristic of imperialism is the competition between a few great powers fighting for hegemony, i.e. for the conquest of land, not so much for its own sake as to weaken the adversary and undermine his hegemony (for Germany Belgium is of particular importance as a base against England, etc.)”... and therefore, in turn, Baghdad is important as a base against Germany, etc.
Since then ninety years have gone past and the situation has simply continued in that same direction, with growing destruction and bloodshed in the succeeding share-outs, as demonstrated by two world wars and the infinite number of minor wars that have tormented the second post-war period alone. The imperialist phase of capitalism does not attenuate the contrasts, the clashes, the attacks: indeed it makes them keener, inflates them, brings them to a head, until they are made to explode first in local wars and then, when the economic and social situation throughout the world is ripe, in new worldwide slaughter. Capital, in its imperialist phase, knows no other way of escaping from its own structural crisis and it is only reformist, pacifist, petit-bourgeois short-sightedness that suggests that some form of balance is possible, some sort of stable alliance between international bandits.
Again Lenin: “Therefore, in capitalist reality, and not in the vulgar Philistine imagination of English priests or the German ‘Marxist’ Kautsky, ‘inter-imperialist’ or ‘ultra-imperialist’ alliances are none other than a ‘breathing space’ between one war or another, whatever form those alliances take, whether that of an imperialist coalition, or a league of all the imperialist powers. Peace alliances prepare wars and, in turn, are born of them; both forms are reciprocally determined and produce, on a single and identical terrain, [that] of imperialist connections and the relations of world economy and world politics, the alternation of the pacific and non-pacific forms of struggle”.
War, then, and not peace; growing aggressiveness; the global dimension of local conflicts – this is the reality of imperialism, this is the reality of our daily life. Lebanon, Palestine, India, Korea, Somalia, Darfur; it is not a question of far-off wars but of clashes through which the world’s imperialist bandits strike at each other, robbing from each other strategic areas and sources of raw materials or the routes they pass along, keep an eye on each other from a distance, punish ex-allies or the allies of others, and above all terrorize and massacre entire populations. And acting in this way, with a bestiality that grows in direct ratio to the volume of capital at stake, and together with this, to the parasitism and putrefaction inherent in capitalism, they smooth the way for the next world war,the third world bloodbath to come, when the crisis will have precipitated to a level where it becomes inevitable and necessary to bring about the atrocious destruction of surplus production, of excess goods, including the human commodities that goes under the name of labour force.
This is what the incessant winds of war tell us, those winds that will continue to blow with increasing strength.
What can be done then? “Naturally, the proletariat in every country must first put an end to its own bourgeoisie,” proclaimed the Communist Manifesto (1848). This means: no concessions to your own bourgeoisie, no sacrifices for the national economy, an open boycott of war efforts of any nature or in any form whatsoever, open opposition to nationalism and chauvinism however they are disguised. And this means both in the countries directly involved in the conflicts, where it is tragically easy to fall into the nationalist, patriotic trap of “defence of the nation” or “support” for one bourgeois faction or the other, against some another bourgeois faction, and in the imperialist heartland, where the best help that can be given to the disinherited and desperate masses in those areas, tormented by their ferociously opposed nationalistic bourgeoisies (the Israeli one as the longa manusof the USA, just like the Arab one, hungering after the income from oil), is to return to the path of open and direct class struggle against the states of all bourgeoisies.
But this means working mainly on spreading the international roots of the revolutionary party, which has been missing from the world arena for too long, after a counter-revolution that has been going on for eighty years now. Only like this will it be possible to find a way out of that blind alley in which everything collapses or destroys, and set out, instead, however difficult and complex this may be, on the path of the revolution leading to a class-free society – to communism.
July 2006
LENIN ON INTERNATIONALISM
If a German under Wilhelm or a Frenchman under Clemenceau says, “It is my right and duty as a socialist to defend my country if it is invaded by an enemy”, lie argues not like a socialist, not like an internationalist, not like a revolutionary proletarian, but like a petty—bourgeois nationalist. Because this argument ignores the revolutionary class struggle of the workers against capital, it ignores the appraisal of the war as a whole from the point of view of the world bourgeoisie and the world proletariat, that is, it ignores internationalism, and all that remains is miserable and narrow—minded nationalism. My country is being wronged, that is all I care about—that is what this argument amounts to, and that is where its petty—bourgeois, nationalist narrow—mindedness lies. […] The Frenchman, German or Italian who says: “Socialism is opposed to violence against nations, therefore Idefend myself when my country is invaded”, betrays socialism and internationalism, because such a man sees only his own “country”, he puts “his own” ... bourgeoisie above everything else and does not give a thought to theinternational connections which make the war an imperialist war and his bourgeoisie a link in the chain of imperialist plunder. […]
The socialist, the revolutionary proletarian, the internationalist, argues differently. He says: “The character of the war (whether it is reactionary or revolutionary) does not depend on who the attacker was, or in whose country the ’enemy’ is stationed; it depends on what class is waging the war, and on what politics this war is a continuation of. If the war is a reactionary, imperialist war, that is, if it is being waged by two world groups of the imperialist, rapacious, predatory, reactionary bourgeoisie, then every bourgeoisie (even of the smallest country) becomes a participant in the plunder, and my duty as a representative of the revolutionary proletariat is to prepare for the world proletarian revolution as theonly escape from the horrors of a world slaughter. I must argue, not from the point of view of ’my’ country (for that is the argument of a wretched, stupid, petty—bourgeois nationalist who does not realise that he is only a plaything in the hands of the imperialist bourgeoisie), but from the point of view of my share in the preparation, in the propaganda, and in the acceleration of the world proletarian revolution.”
That is what internationalism means, and that is the duty of the internationalist, the revolutionary worker, the genuine socialist.
Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky(1918)
International Communist Party
(International Papers - Cahiers Internationalistes - Il Programma Comunista)