The world proletariat will have to regain its class independence, In the face of all factions of war, present and future

Around mid-August, a significant wave of schizophrenia shook the world.  In Beijing the Olympic Games opened to the usual accompaniment of hypocritical rhetoric on “universal brotherhood” and “democracy as the supreme value”.During those very same days, in South Ossetia, the Georgian tanks were entering the “rebel region”, reducing the capital to flames and instantly attracting severe punishment from its Russian protector: thousands of deaths amongst civilians, an unknown number of wounded, masses fleeing towards the north, “ethnic cleansing” of Ossetian separatists… [1] And then, everything seemed to ebb into the same old game of international diplomacy, with the tug of war of declarations, statements, the summits and the mediation: but there is another fire smouldering under the embers.

So is this what was going on behind the fireworks?  Is this what was concealed behind the “sacred protest” in favour of “human rights trampled in China”?  On the one hand, in the name of future business deals, all our television screens exhuded authentic jubilation over Chinese capitalism and its great managers (men and women), the century-old history of the Chinese nation, its technology and its working man, so small but so precious and scrupulous in observing the dictates of wage labour.  On the other hand, the winds of war, fuelled by that same agonizing mode of production which gave birth to the “son et lumière” performances in the Eternal City, swept across another area of economic, social, political and strategic earthquakes, the Caucasus, after having devastated the Balkans and the Middle East.

“Who is right?” wondered the ever-“problematic” Italian daily Manifesto of 9 August.  Thus continuing:  “The ethnic, historical, political, military puzzle in those few square miles in the foothills of the Caucasus is a knot that is impossible to unravel.  Right and wrong are entangled and the temptation to use the sword to cut through the knot is strong.”  To find a way out of our difficulties, all we can do is console ourselves, then: there is no individual responsibility, it is the fate of a martyred land, the dissolution of the USSR which has not yet come to its conclusion, it’s all because of the oil, etc. etc. … And memories of the previous war are evoked, in the same places and between the same protagonists as in 1991-92: deadly clashes with thousands of victims and refugees, ending in stalemate, in a sort of independence recognized by no-one, not even by Russia.         

It was the Georgian President Saakashvili, a puppet in the hands of US imperialism, who launched the attack against the separatist region: but the provocation got out of hand, remarks the Italian economic daily Il Sole - 24 ore on that same 9 August, and Moscow’s retaliation was immediate and severe. Having crossed Northern Ossetia, through the road corridors permitted by the Caucasian mountains, the tanks continued into the contested territory, threatening to invade Georgia, whilst another separatist province, Abkhazia, started to awaken.  Russian imperialism no longer agrees to be squeezed into a corner by the advancing influence of its imperialist competitor: and so, a strong sign had to be given, a show of force in these lands which had only been shifted from their original barycentre by unforeseen events which threw them into the arms of new protectors.

The tons of oil and gas from the off-shore deposits in the Caspian Sea and the oil pipelines to the Mediterranean make Georgia a key country in the Caucasian area.For a long time the issue was the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, starting from Azerbaijan, crossing Georgia and Turkey to reach the Mediterranean – a project set up in 2006 by a consortium including British Petroleum and Total, in which Italian Eni was also a partner.  The Azeri oil reduces Europe’s dependence on Russia for power, because it by-passes Russia on its way to the Mediterranean. Thus, to consider some sort of “independence” for Georgia, as for any other country in the area, whilst faced with the international agreements amongst imperialist predators, is pure madness. Their existence depends exclusively on the delicate diplomatic and military balance between the USA (and any western allies) and Russia. Georgia, an ally of the imperialism of the stars and stripes, has had to swallow the bitter pill of the numerous Russian military bases that have been situated on its territory for over ten years, as well as the more or less artificial creation of areas with separatist tendencies [2].  This was the price paid by the USA to guarantee the security of the pipelines destined for the Turkish coasts of the Mediterranean and no-one fails to see this as a trigger point for the European economy, as well as a huge source of income from the transport and commerce of hydrocarbons. Around a million barrels a day flow through the Georgian-Turkish pipeline, or 1.1% of world production:  this is a tempting slice of the cake, badly digested by Russia but which has made some western companies extremely happy. The situation thus sees on the one hand Russia, threatened by the constitution in Georgia of an economic satellite in the hands of western imperialism, which would like to transform it into a strategic and military ally, shortly making it a member of NATO together with the Ukraine (for years now the military organization of the Georgian army has been “looked after” by the USA); on the other hand, this same western imperialism has nonetheless had to come to a compromise with Russian interests, ceding military control of part of Georgia’s territory and accepting the constitution of authentic ghost-states, whose nature is claimed to be rooted in so-called ethnic, religious or linguistic micro-identities.

A situation like this is obviously unsustainable when wider-ranging economic and strategic tensions start to arise.  As in the Balkans, the whole of the Caucasian area can rapidly turn into a keg of dynamite ready to explode: the common denominator of these situations is the fight for control of the main strategic areas in Europe and Asia.  As in the Balkans, the Caucasus, too, is vital for East-West connections; just like Kosovo, Georgia is fed and equipped by the USA; here, as there, the “downtrodden rights of oppressed ethnic groups” are evoked or will be.It was (in the Balkans) and will be (in the Caucasus) these rights that justify the “humanitarian” intervention and military clash (still in its latent state) between imperialisms. In the Balkans the game served to allow Yankee imperialism to take a threatening tone towards the timid European advances (first and foremost by the Germans). In the Caucasus, it will serve to get round the obvious resistance by Russia to NATO penetration of the southern borders (something that, according to official statements, should happen at the end of this year) with the dispatch of the UN’s “military observers” – which will change absolutely nothing in the new state of tension that has built up.

After the glowing embers of conflict in Kosovo were revived, with American and European approval of the independence of Pristina, feeding Serbian irredentism, Albanian and Greek greed for Macedonia and the separation between Bosnia and Herzegovina, we wrote that sooner or later the revival of the conflict would spread to nearby areas, where claims and fake “unresolved national issues” were being fuelled by sharp-eyed international stirrers [3]. Already the commentators expected a declaration of independence by South Ossetia and formal recognition; already military preparations were underway in Georgia and in Russia (on 17/7 two military exercises were held, a Russian one in the north of the Caucasus and a Georgian-US one; on 16/7 the Georgian parliament approved a 26.8% increase in military spending, bringing the numbers of troops from 32 000 to 37 000; data supplied by Il Manifesto on 9/8). Even earlier the imperialist outlaws’ game of Risiko had spread to the most varied regions of the world:  brandishing separatist ideas amongst the pro-Russian and pro-American regions of the Ukraine, blocking the flow of oil towards Germany, feeding revanchist enthusiasms in the Baltic countries that see the passage of Russian pipelines through the Baltic and promoting strategic war alliances in Poland and the Czech Republic with the anti-missile shields.

The players acting out the massacre are the same as ever: the same old imperialisms know that these are strategic areas in peace and in war: “destabilize in order to stabilize” has always been the imperialist motto, both in the west and in the east; terrorizing harmless populations by setting in motion terrible machines of war, capable of destroying whole cities in a single “conventional” attack, opening up immense chasms and gutting buildings: this has always been the objective. After the collapse of the USSR, here, too, in these areas, “everything has changed, so that everything can stay the same as before.”  The old Russian bear sets out again on his uninterrupted march and the winds of the next world war blow more strongly.  Under the claws of the Russian Federation this area has seen blood in Chechnya (200 000 dead) and the neighbouring Ingushetia. South Ossetia (the only corridor for rapid transit to Tbilisi) and Abkhazia on the Black Sea are two strategic areas for Russia: not by chance were the missile sites and Georgian port of Poti bombed and not by chance do these regions demand independence from Georgia, which obtained its own independence of Russia in 1991 and today takes refuge under the protective mantle of US dollars and the NATO armed forces. And Nagorno Karabakh, under the control of Armenian troops, and Azerbaijan, whose line of ceasefire has remained unchanged since 1994, when will they start to simmer again? And isn’t Turkish Kurdistan just a gunshot away from Iran and Armenia? How much time will pass before the pre-announced attack on Iran by Israel and the USA becomes operational (Israel is always the justification of justifications for any “humanitarian, democratic and…holy war”)? Will the deadly capacity for attack and provocation, the presence of nuclear warheads, the ability to wipe out any of their neighbours ever drive the Israeli proletariat to sabotage the position of all the dominant classes (“the aggressors are always the others”) and turn them towards a class position (“the true enemy is in our own country”)?

In the middle, Europe (or the Europe the lower middle class dreams of: economically, militarily…and culturally united), obliged to move through this difficult groundswell in the hope that the storm will pass.  In the meantime it can take advantage of the fact that its “ceasefire” position (primarily expressed by France and Germany) has been accepted and confirmed by the assembly of countries belonging to NATO.  Of course there have been floods of criticisms and diversification of positions but apart from all this there has also been the mediation between American and Russian interests, on behalf of which Europe calls on the authority of its “pacifist” position in the American war in Iraq, of its important role on behalf of ending (?) the latest Israeli-Lebanese war and of its vigilant watch over the Russian-Ukraine situation before the issue of the oil transit exploded. But just how long will all this last? American pressure to redesign Russia and block its “imperial” and imperialist position is probably destined (at least in the immediate future) for failure due to the effect of the progressive decline of US economic power on the world chessboard; and Europe knows this from experience. The distinction between “old” and “new” Europe is also insignificant.  We discover that the Russia of the Czars, of Stalin, of Breznev and of Putin, apart from the ideological filters that have always served to hide rather than to reveal, has moved, moves and will continue to move along the same historical and material path: the one inevitably traced first by Russia’s young national capitalism and later by the rotting capitalism of the imperialist phase. On the other side, the old English and American imperialisms, by placing NATO (with its more adventurous financial affairs), almost all the Balkan and Baltic countries and those that had a determining role in the Warsaw Pact together in the same pot, believe they are closing the game with Russia.  In reality they are placing Europe itself in danger and in particular Germany, which still today needs a “European Order” with Russia as part of it (this is demanded by the very development of German capitalism - a great exporter of goods and capital).  In fact Europe, this jungle of nationalisms that has already seen proof of the tragedy of “all against all” in the Balkans, will sooner or later have to come clean, breaking with fake political unity, illusory monetary agreements and awkward partners like Poland and the Czech Republic. Neither the protection of unity nor enlargement towards the east will suffice to save it from world pressures; indeed, these are what will accelerate the process of disintegration.  Whilst it endeavours, like a modern Penelope, to save itself from rival claimants, ever extending and unravelling the web of unity, it will have to capitulate and once again find its Führer: and it will find him in that same Germany which, since the end of the Second World War, has always put its own geopolitical interests before Russian-American negotiations on its territory and before “pacific co-existence” as the fruit of share-out and condominium, and which – once more – will demand satisfaction.  A Germany, nonetheless, that today is obliged to co-exist with its previous victors, the first (the USA) gasping for breath and the second (the Russians) with a devastating crisis only just behind them.  Thus, since it would be fatal today for Germany to go it alone, this Europe has to put on a smile: mediating and balancing things.  Not by chance Il Sole – 24 ore of 20 August writes: “There is a vast area of ground where Russia can be offered joint management of international order instead of antagonism.  It will be as well to avoid the impression of an armed siege against her, in order to avoid provocative accelerations, in particular by not accepting countries lacking a stable democratic structure as part of NATO.  Diplomatic wisdom and not servitude. Whereupon Russia, in a context of regained collective security, will be able to offer her former republics the prospect of a shared future, restoring economic and cultural relations with them. Westerners, too, need Russia, partly to face the disorder of Islam and the rise of China, if Russian regains a preference for a harmonious future, though distant today, rather than the facile choice of immediate and unproductive violence.” Smile, then!

***

All according to the book, then:  the aggressor, the attacked, the defender of the aggressor, the defender of the attacked, the hopeless game of international diplomacy…All déjà-vus, from the First World War to the Second and to the hundreds of “little wars” the 1900s have delighted us with in the name of imperialism: to stick to recent times, isn’t it in the name of “abused democracy”, of the defence of a small country under attack (Kuwait), that a sea of fire with a million dead, mostly civilians, has been devastating Iraq since 1991?  Isn’t it in the name of the presumed presence of arms of mass destruction that the war, suspended for a brief period, has been able to continue its infernal march onwards? Isn’t it in order to capture the “enemies of peace” (the talibans, former friends and allies of the USA in their anti-Russian move) that the war has been able to spread over into Afghanistan?

All according to the book, then: but Lenin teaches us that, in the age of imperialism, it is useless to try and distinguish which country is the aggressor and which the attacked, because they are all aggressors, and the only real object of attack is not a country but a class, the proletariat, sent to massacre and be massacred in the line of fire and in the rearguard, in the bombed cities and the devastated countryside.

We repeat once again, because the theoretical-political disaster that has struck the communist movement in the past eighty years has caused it to be forgotten: the proletarians of the Caucasus, the Balkans, the Middle East, eastern Europe must break once and for all the pseudo-nationalist chains which bound them hand and foot in the First and Second World Wars to the imperialist objectives of oil; and they must be careful not to be infected by the middle classes and their imbecile ideologies which incite people to “choose the side they’re on” every few minutes.The only “side” for proletarians is that of the class struggle against their respective national bourgeoisies, against a society of exploitation and hunger; the fight to win power under the guidance of the revolutionary party and to impose its own class dictatorship.

“It’s all a matter of oil, of borders, of national independence,” the reports reassure us: issues that can be solved, according to them, by means of economic and political agreements and a lot of good will.  Democracy will be able to turn the clock back and peace will continue to shine…on the cemeteries. We are left with the certainty that this new battlefront is another chime of bells marking the hour of overall slaughter: against which only authentic class politics, aiming to strike down capitalism, are able to stand as a way out and save humanity from the horrors of a new world war. We know that these politics will meet with a wave of eternal pacifist positions, the anti-imperialist marches, the exhortations to social peace: but we are certain that the international proletariat, caught between the everlasting threat of war on the one hand and, on the other, the increasingly unbearable conditions in which they are obliged to live by the chronic crisis of international capital, will finally choose the right path, indicated and represented by its revolutionary party: the definitive elimination of existing society.