As we write (the beginning of September 2013), the attack on Syria promised by “pacifist” Obama, followed dutifully by the tail-wagging “socialist” Hollande, with his nostalgia for past French imperialist glories, has not yet become operational. But this is irrelevant. The past twenty years have been a horrifying sequence of more or less uninterrupted, bloody wars, the massacre of civilian populations and open, state-perpetrated anti-proletarian terrorism. If and when the attack may be made and in whatever way (“limited” or “extended” in the cynical language of the military command headquarters and war-mongering politics), it would be just one more link in a chain of fire that has been closing around the throat of the world proletariat for some time now, moving closer to the citadels of capitalism every day. The whole North African and Middle Eastern stretch of the Mediterranean, from Tunisia to Syria, 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.
This is the world offered to us (and offered to the younger generations) by capitalism in the grips of its own crisis: a world dominated by increasingly lethal wars. But war, for those who have not lost their memories, is the “natural”, daily condition in the bourgeois world’s way of life: the war of all against all. The bourgeois world is up to its neck in violence: it grounded and established itself on violence and by means of violence defended and defends its existence and its power. When its contradictions reach the limit, the point of no return, the passage from “peace” to open warfare is inevitable: this is the lesson we learn from two world wars and an infinite number of local ones during the course of the last century. In other articles we have recalled that “the capitalist war is the destruction of surplus, and reconstruction”: it is the ultimate business deal that allows capital to find a way out of the blind alley of a crisis of over-production of goods and capitals and to start functioning again at full capacity.
In these few days, whilst waiting for the word “go” for a fight declared by one assembly of bandits on another, some pen-pusher wrote (see the Italian daily Corriere della Sera of 3/9) that, according to the US Chief of Staff, Dempsey, “every day of warfare can cost a billion dollars.” “Cost?” “Cost” means that somewhere that billion dollars must end up, primarily in the arms industry and then in all the others connected to it and catering for all that is involved in warfare – from food supplies to transport to footwear to infrastructures of all types, all the endless civilian as well as military side effects. A billion dollars a day! A true gift for boosting an economy that is having trouble re-launching itself.
“But Assad…” will be the retort. Yes, Assad! The Syrian régime that is starving and massacring its proletarian masses and those that are becoming proletarianized has in its hands a rising capitalism that is closely connected to world capitalism (and not only to its Russian or Iranian “friends”, as an idiotic “one-way anti-imperialism” would have it). We have already documented (see our Italian-language bi-monthly Il programma comunista, n.4/2012) the message that is clearly to be read in the Syrian import-export figures: exports directed primarily towards Europe and secondly (surprise, surprise!) towards the North-American NAFTA area, with imports featuring (another surprise!) US wheat in first place. This is the proof that in a capitalist régime business deals can be done with anyone, “friends” and “foes”: later, when necessary, they are cut down. Cynicism? Let’s call it that, if it’s a question of moralism: for us communists it’s a matter of economic laws, of the extension of the law of value and law of profit on a worldwide, geo-political level.
It is a war between bandits and whoever shows signs of wanting to oppose it (Russia and China) or standing apart (Germany) only does so to look after their own affairs (as to Italy, as we all know, it is always ready to sell out for the right price). But the capitalist war is also a war against the proletariat, an extreme version of the conflict that takes place every day at places of work and non-work, with the extraction of plus-value, the inhuman exploitation of enormous masses of salaried workers, the expulsion of more masses from the production process condemning them to emigration or the most meagre of survivals – with that “growing misery” that only imbeciles refuse to see, whilst every day that goes by it tramples the existence of proletarian and proletarianized masses all over the world.
Over the past three years we have seen uprisings spread over the North-African stretch of the Mediterranean: originally purely proletarian uprisings (Tunisia, Egypt), they were immediately deviated and caught up in the labyrinth of democratic claims by the appearance on the scene of bourgeois factions and the most bastard half classes with no ideas of their own, who constitute the scum of bourgeois society, its trash, its stinking, frothing flotsam. With the proletarian uprising deviated and annulled, what so many idiots hastened to acclaim as “revolutions” found themselves up the blind alley of their own impotence and flung open the door to violent “normalization”: from inside and from outside the iron fist crashed down onto the proletarian and proletarianized masses.
The military strike in Libya, with its arrowhead consisting of French capitalism in search of affirmation in an area both nearby and precious to it, was not so much intended to remove the puppet Ghedaffi, as to thrust a red-hot blade of iron between Tunisia and Egypt at a moment when the proletarian uprisings in the two countries could have welded together, with the danger of them then spreading east towards the Middle Eastern countries which have been in flames for decades, forcing the masses in these countries (first and foremost Arabs and Palestinians, but not only) towards prospects at long last not merely national and nationalist.
“Events in Syria”, as has been well documented in past issues of this newspapers, are moving in this direction. The pretext, increasingly cynical and more revolting (“weapons of mass destruction”!), will only succeed in fooling the idiots who firmly believe in the “mission” of one nation or the other to promenade “justice, peace and democracy” around the world, perched on the sights of the latest technological weapon, or leaving the other sort of idiot – the ones who have never ceased to believe in or advocate Obama’s “pacifism” or Hollande’s “socialism” – gaping with a vague sensation of their own imbecility.
The winds of war blow stronger and stronger. Each time we have recalled the inexorable tendency of capital to solve its own contradictions, now at their extreme limit, by means of warfare, we have heard ourselves accused of being Cassandras and visionaries. Instead, it’s time for proletarians in all countries to open up their eyes to what is increasingly becoming a realistic prospect, accelerated by the same dynamics of the crisis of overproduction of goods and capital – a crisis that is crushing the life out of numerous proletarians in the meat grinder of the capitalist mode of production.
All this and its final, bloody outcome, can be opposed, but only by taking up once again with firm decision the path of open class struggle against the various national bourgeoisies, in the unbending, unhesitating refusal, without caution or uncertainty, to accept sacrifices for the higher good of the Nation, to fall into the trap of the “enemy at our gates”, to take the side of one bandit against another, to contribute to the war effort: indeed, sabotaging it, today at the work place and tomorrow on the battlefield. Quite a different matter from prayers, fasts, banners of peace and pathetic parades!
The only war the world proletariat can and must take on, in the conviction of its necessity for doing away once and for all with the bloody monster that massacres men, women, the elderly and children in every corner of the globe, is class warfare, for the communist revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is the prospect we work towards in the International Communist Party.
International Communist Party