In the last months, with accusations and counter-accusations flying, the world stage has been filled with the ridiculous argument over “telephone and telematics interception”: this all shows - wonder of wonders! – that everyone is spying on everyone else, as befits a world where “everyone is at war with everyone” (naturally we shall not dwell here on the miserable Italian political burlesque, in which all the parliamentary currents are on stage). For us communists the signals to watch have always been, and still are, quite different.
If the much-aired military intervention in Syria, initially urged by the USA and France, has not yet taken place, the war in the country is nonetheless continuing between bourgeois factions supported by one imperialist power or the other with the consequent massacre of proletarians and the mass exodus to countries near or far. Meanwhile, clashes between opposing factions have sprung up again in Libya and whole areas of sub-Saharan Africa remain in a constant state of belligerence, harassed by armed gangs which are none other than the military arm (the Foreign Legion, so to say) of economic and financial interests, and not only local ones. “The whole North African and Middle Eastern stretch of the Mediterranean, from Tunisia to Syria”, we wrote in a previous article, “is now a single battleground – a half moon devastated by the most highly sophisticated technology of destruction – and it is from here, when the incurable contradictions of a dying mode of production precipitate, that the spark may come to set off a far more monstrous blaze than that of a local or regional conflict. Beyond Syria, to the east, stretch more battlefields, actual or potential, right up to the Far East where more tension, potentially ungovernable, slumbers just beneath the surface”.
Meanwhile the moves and counter-moves of international diplomacy (the agreement with the Syrian régime on the destruction of chemical weapons, the negotiations taking place – more or less punctuated by hiccups – on Iran’s nuclear project) show that the development of conflicting inter-imperial relations in the most complex key points on the world chess-board have reached a situation of deadlock, in which no-one yet dares to take a decisive step for fear of shattering the fragile balance. Under the pressure of a devastating economic crisis (the ‘experts’ busy themselves with spreading reassuring signals whilst the truth is that there is no recovery, new bubbles are swelling, unemployment is on the rise everywhere – in Spain it is already over 24-26% - and the threat of new and generalized deflation continues), the whole of the capitalist world is adrift: the most powerful imperialism (the U.S.) is clearly declining; Europe is inevitably a mass of national appetites; France on the one hand and Germany on the other play, or try to play, central roles - the former on a diplomatic-military plane (the interventions in Libya and Mali, and more recently in the Central African Republic; a first halt to the Iranian nuclear project), the latter on the economic-political one; England plays its now historical role as the fifth column of U.S. imperialism and thus suffers its decline; as to the former young capitalist climbers (the so-called BRICS), they are already starting to run out of breath. Increasingly, individual countries are travelling blind in a desperate climate of “Save yourself if you can!”.
Of great significance on this scenario has been the irritation with which the American “old capitalism” (followed suit some days later by the EU) berated German capitalism because … it was exporting too much. Germany was accused at the end of October by the Currency Report drawn up by the U.S. Treasury of having compensated for domestic austerity by exporting. The Italian daily La Repubblica of 1/11/2013 sums the issue up as follows: “During the whole of the Eurozone’s financial crisis […] Germany maintained a comfortable surplus; in 2012 it was even greater than China’s”; and it quotes from the Report as follows: “The anemic growth rate of Germany’s internal demand and its dependence on exports have been an obstacle to rebalancing, at a time when many other Eurozone countries have undergone severe pressure to cut their internal demand and limit exports, in order to promote rebalancing. […] the net result has been a movement towards deflation in the Eurozone, as for the entire world economy.” Germany’s reply was simple and predictable: “Stop bothering us! We’re looking after our own business!” - as befits any national capital involved in keen competition on an international market.
For us communists, this is a far more important signal than a thousand and one revelations of criminal wheeling and dealing by the secret services of one country or another: the accusation clearly appears to speak the language of trade wars which, in the long-term, announce military warfare. This is the prospect, inherent not in the “thirst for power” of one country or another or in the “crazy paranoia” of some ruler or other, but in the material dynamics of the laws governing how the capitalist mode of production works, for which the world proletariat must prepare itself. The world proletariat, we stress: because the process of proletarianization has intensified over the past decades, partly under the pressure of the economic crisis, and now affects every corner of the world. Enormous masses of desperate people are fleeing from wars, famine, growing poverty and ending up on beaches and at frontiers all over the planet: from Lampedusa in Italy to El Paso in the United States, from Ceuta in Spain to Liverpool in Great Britain, from the Turkish-Syrian border to the one between Egypt and Israel, from south-east Asia to eastern Europe… They leave everything and they lose everything, they are merely hands on the labour market, that gigantic industrial reserve army so precious to capital: it brings down salaries and paralyzes the lucky ones who still have a semblance of work (i. e. are exploited) using blackmail. In terms of their material conditions of survival, they are not only without any reserves, but also without a homeland, wandering from one country to another, chased and beaten by “the forces of law and order”, feared and hated by the national petit-bourgeoisie, which is growing nastier and nastier the more it feels itself losing status and buying power, oppressed by States that reveal to them their intrinsic nature as the armed guardians of class dominion: in the bare facts of this enormous mass tragedy, their “identity” (ethnic, national, religious) disappears, diluted and washed away by the tsunami of the capitalist mode of production.
But on the ideological plane of everyday life, those “identities” are constantly taken up again, skillfully reconstructed and made the most of by the nations’ ruling classes who have long experience in making divisions between people and creating illusions and mystification, fuelled by bourgeois and petit-bourgeois forces in politics and the unions. These are ruling classes that know perfectly well that the more divisions there are in the proletariat – by reason of ethnic background, religion, nationality, gender, age, place, workplace, those “with jobs” and those “without jobs” – the more fragmented, isolated, broken down the proletariat is, the more “class in itself” (class for capital and thus with all the tremendous stigmata of the capital-work relationship), the more absolute their dominion is and the longer the extraction of plus-value (the unavoidable law of value and profit) can proceed undisturbed, the longer the capitalist mode of production can pursue its path, groggy as it may be and however shaken by increasingly acute crises.
Internationalism is thus an undeniable fact on the one hand and, on the other, an objective to be attained – one without which it is impossible to fight this constant fragmentation of the world proletariat into segments destined to attack and throttle one another in a future world bloodbath. Nonetheless, it is an internationalism that must no longer be a tired slogan for marches but a daily practice of struggle, with the immediate and total refusal of all those directives (ideological, political, stemming from bourgeois or labour parties as well as from the unions) that tend, instead, to see it forgotten or even refused, driving the proletariat backwards and time after time causing divisions into separate and opposing compartments, praising membership of one nation rather than the other (or even factions within the nation), celebrating the past, present and future virtue of the country in question (and we shall soon be seeing how far the centenary of the first world massacre, the 1914-18 war, will serve this purpose), placing the superior needs of the national economy before anything else and pointing to the State as the obligatory reference point and to its military extensions as “beneficial guardians”.
Only in the daily practice of defence from attacks by capital (selling ones skin dearly, which is the starting point of any future political fight) and in constant contact with the theory and practice (organizational and in terms of direction) of the revolutionary party, directed towards overthrowing dominion and towards the dictatorial seizing and management of power, can the words of the 1848 Manifesto once again acquire life, body, voice and above all strength: “Proletarians all over the world, unite!”
December 2013
International Communist Party