“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.
But we communists also know that every mode of production has its own history – birth, maturity, death – and therefore, once the phase of war against the old mode of production is over, the next phase is that of the obstinate and savage clinging to power, a long agony to which all that can be done is put an end to it, violently and authoritatively. We have been in this phase for a hundred and fifty years, a phase in which the bourgeois mode of production is no longer more progressive than in the past but merely bloody and destructive: reaching a level of bloodiness and destruction unthinkable for previous modes of production (which were no joke, either!). In particular, the imperialist phase of capitalism that began at the end of the eighteen hundreds, its inevitable evolution foreseen by Marx and Engels ever since the beginning (monopoly, state intervention, colonialism, the central role of financial capital in economic life, etc. etc.), has driven the bloody destructiveness of capitalism to monstrous extremes.
Just think of the 1900s: a whole century of wars and not only the two great imperialist bloodbaths of the First and Second World Wars. Both conflicts were preceded by a myriad of “minor” wars, more or less local ones or at least passed off as such (in fact, they were the screen for still hidden, inter-imperialist clashes, ready to explode): for example the fifteen years preceding 1914 and the fifteen preceding 1939. And afterwards! Since 1945, how many conflicts have massacred whole populations and devastated entire regions? How many deaths have there been on the battlefields or behind the lines, how many generations killed off? And in this start of a new millennium, in these sixteen years that have seen an exponential multiplication of hotbeds and explosions of conflict, the soaring figures for the arms industry and various other destructive inventions, the gigantic growth in the n-zero numbers of proletarians devastated by bombing, mass killings, lethal gas, white phosphorus, or even just famine and the desperate flight from war territories?
“Capitalism is war!” we have always stated. And there is an even more sinister and disturbing aspect in our affirmation, which corresponds to the situation in the 1900s: as we have recalled and demonstrated on more than one occasion, there are many technological innovations on which we congratulate ourselves today and which originate from the war effort, the preparation of one war or another and their spread on a planetary scale… War is in the DNA of capitalism even when it is apparently at peace: and those who fail to realize this are just convenient idiots.
And then there is another war that has been going on ever since the dawn of the bourgeois mode of production. It is the class war, the ineradicable, more or less open, more or less latent conflict between capital and labour, the ruling class and the ruled class, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. It is a war that broke out almost immediately, in the factories, in the fields, in the cities, in the places of savage exploitation of men, women, children and old people, who took up the battle for survival and, in certain historical situations, for the affirmation of the new mode of production, classless and without exploitation: the Paris Commune of 1871, the October Revolution of 1917, the revolutionary attempt in China in 1927 – heroic attempts to open up a new chapter in the history of humanity, no matter if they were defeated in the field.
This class war continues today. It may seem that at the moment the bourgeoisie alone is fighting it, against the proletariat: with the deaths in factories, mines, building yards, the murder of proletarians in the picket lines at the hand of blacklegs, “the forces of law and order”, legal and illegal gangs of repression, a true massacre of proletarians exhausted and worn down by work, by the frenzied pace, harmful substances, the cruel exploitation of migrants and clandestine workers and all the social effects these deaths, murders and this exploitation have on the entire population. Or with the tragedy of the present or future unemployment of whole generations without any prospects other than to beg the miserable charity of the State today, and tomorrow – when the moment comes – hurl themselves one against the other on the battlefields of the next world war that is being prepared. Today it is the bourgeoisie that is leading the class war. And this is true, but only partly. Class antagonism, even when it appears to be slumbering or inexistent, is really dramatically alive: the very presence of the proletariat, the way its numbers are swelling infinitely as an effect of the economic crisis, the enormous mass of migrants crowding at the gates of the more capitalistically advanced countries, are in themselves the potential elements and factors of antagonism. From historical experience, the ruling class knows this very well and tries to face up to it in various ways, fuelling racism and wars between the poor, introducing all possible repressive measures, equipping itself for a class war that is ineradicable and lying in wait even when it does not appear to be. The economic crisis itself, which the bourgeoisie is unable to solve and leave behind, is a factor that fuels antagonism, laying the objective, material bases for the class conflict. That’s the way it is, oh fine souls: and if the proletariat does not seem to be aware of it today, it will be these same objective forces that drive it to the clash, the revolt, the rebellion, on pain of its own survival.
We communists, and with us the more combative proletarians, the militant avant-gardes, know that this is what we are obliged to go through. We shall not allow, they will not allow, the bourgeoisie to lead this war for much longer. Power must therefore be seized from them by force, with violence (what ruling class has ever bent its head peacefully to its class enemy?) – a force and a violence that will have to be organized and directed by the revolutionary party. This is what we communists are working towards. To prevent the ruling class once again emerging victorious from the umpteenth worldwide bloodbath.
November-December 2016
International Communist Party