Over the past few decades, the crisis in accumulation of capital followed by the phase of expansion deriving from the second deadly inter-imperial conflict has continued with its ups and downs, pseudo-recoveries and far more evident crashes. This is how the deep causes of imperialist conflicts have been reinforced, as they prepare to generate a new showdown between imperialisms, necessary for the capitalist mode of production to survive.
Other works of ours have followed and analysed the evolution of these clashes and the reinforcement or weakening of the main players but the backbone of the critical analysis of this march towards conflict remains unchanged. Just as the only strategy for contrasting or halting the wars between imperial States necessarily remains unchanged; just as remains necessarily unchanged the demanding path of organising a proletarian opposition that is antagonistic, revolutionary, worldwide, clear and determined, coalescing around the theory, principles, programme and tactics of the communist party - and in open contrast to the reformist, demagogic and pseudo-revolutionary politics, embodied by intellectuals of all colours, orders and degrees who, like so many useless parasites, draw energy from the majority of us, the sellers of labour-power, in order to build their own careers as the ruling class’s supervisors. The conclusion is: to spend no money and no soldiers at all for capital’s wars; defeatism and no agreements with bourgeois countries; to transform the imperialist war between bourgeois States into a revolutionary war within the bourgeois States.
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Klausewitz’s definition of war as “the continuation of politics on a different plane and with different means…“ expresses and reflects bourgeois society so well that it can easily be turned upside down: politics is the projection, on a different plane and with different means, of that state of permanent conflict, often subterranean and not necessarily armed, which is the real way of being and becoming of the capitalist mode of production. That is to say: economic competition between „young and emerging“ capitals; trade wars between monopolies in order to possess markets and supremacy in vital sectors of production or sourcing of raw materials; to start with diplomatic warfare, then armed warfare, when the antagonism between States (which, in the lingering era of imperialism are none other than the expression of a „national, capitalist collective“) reach a point of extreme tension and seek the „solution“ in an organised, armed conflict, in war tout court…
Obviously many factors need to concur for the link between the successive phases of a single process to appear evident and demolish the theories constructed and promoted to support the boast that the balance found in any one of these may consolidate into a sort of „perpetual peace“, uneasy as it may be.
So it happened that before the outbreak of the Gulf crisis, war seemed by then to „belong to another era“: an illusion that gained some credit from the end of USA-USSR bi-polarism [1]. Yet it sufficed for an area of vital importance for capitalism, both for the provision of energy and for the control and sharing of income from crude oil and the gigantic network of interests that sprang up out of it, to become a tangle of contrasts irresolvable on a purely economic or diplomatic plane, for the spectre of military clashes, whose lasting demise had just been celebrated, to return to the stage, and a conflict that had at first seemed peripherical to grow into a more or less planetary one. That conflict, together with those following the break-up of the Republic of Yugoslavia, independently of contingent dynamics, opened up the prospect, however remote, of a third world bloodbath - featuring on the one hand the old economic powers and on the other those that had emerged and were emerging, with new potential alliances and the awareness that the balances of power arising from the ashes of the „postwar“ period had been upset.
From that moment onwards, two illusory answers to the prospect of war made themselves heard once again. One is that of a generalised and equally inconclusive pacifism, consisting of petitions, protests, demonstrations (peaceful of course) calling on and involving the widest variety of social forces: a sort of pacifism incapable of understanding and therefore facing up, even to a minimum degree, to the substance of the matter and in the end ready to turn into its very opposite as soon as not only, or not so much, the „values“ (interests!!) of the „nation“ are harmed or even just threatened, but also the idealistic, more or less humanitarian abstractions of freedom, democracy, civil rights… Ever more convinced, even after the last two inter-imperialist slaughters, of the idea that the defence of these abstractions can translate into one or more just wars, this pacifism can, in fact, transform itself into the grimmest sort of interventionism in the space of a single „amen“.
The other illusory answer consists in appealing to institutions that proclaim to hold „supra-national“ powers thus able to impose acknowledgement of an international order and resolve eventual disputes by diplomatic means. Apart from the absurdity of a vision of history in general and of capitalism in particular calibrated or able to be calibrated according to rights, laws or conventions, what is forgotten is that more than one of these so-called supra-national organs exist, each responding to the interests of one power or power group or another: the seven most industrialised countries, the famous G7, act as a sort of world economic committee, more or less in agreement internally but generally speaking united towards the rest of the world; the UN Security Council acts as the right arm of the five permanent members of the association, whose opinion, unanimous or otherwise, in turn determines what passes for decisions that are independent ones taken by members of the Assembly; an indeterminate number of regional and inter-regional organisms defend, within the limits of possibility, the interests, not exactly „ideals“, of power groups belonging to specific areas, etc.. The whole mechanism operates not on the basis of international codes of good conduct but of economic, political and military power relations and its ability not so much to guarantee, as to sanction a sort of „order“ or, as they put it, a system of „international law“, depends on how far one or more powers manage to impose their law, or the law of the strongest: the fruit of previous theft and sharing of booty, which they aim to ensure conservation of. And right when these balances of power change or are about to change, these organisms reveal their hypocrisy and uselessness.
Communist criticism has shown that wars are a necessary product of the capitalist mode of production, impossible to eliminate, and that only proletarian revolution may stop them from breaking out or violently halt their continuation. It is also true that at times of crisis in the mechanism of capital accumulation, war is the extreme cure which the bourgeoisie cannot fail to turn to in order to perpetuate its own rule, with the mass destruction of capitals, commodities and labour, in short, of human beings and the products of their work. This does not mean, however, that the bourgeoisie initiates war on the basis of pondered calculations or more arbitrary rather than free decisions by its legislative or executive organs: it is the dynamics inherent in the capitalist mode of production, its vital needs, that set off the mechanism of the conflict, starting with the economic, ideological, diplomatic preliminaries and concluding with actual mobilisation for real war. War does not break out either „by chance“ or because it is „willed“ by individuals or groups: it is the outcome of an objective situation that has matured throughout a variety of sectors and exploded at a breaking point that has come about in the power relations between the economies of the countries that are candidates for the role of belligerents.
The prime aim of capital, once invested, is to reproduce with profit. Therefore, accumulation drives the entire cycle in the operation of capitalism, making it necessary to spread production beyond all limits. It is the competition, at every phase of accumulation, that selects and brings onto the field first individual capitals (or, to put it briefly, individual capitalists) and, later, as the demands of accumulation become more pressing, collective bodies of production, joint-stock companies, trusts, multinationals, in short, tendentially or effectively monopolistic enterprises whose interests generally reach beyond national borders and find their political expression in their national imperialist State, which guarantees their interests - and, above all, the huge power machine organised to defend them.
Now, whilst – from a technical point of view – the production process grows constantly and without limits, gaining its impetus from the volcanic nature of the production of commodities itself, it tends to diminish the possibility of placing the commodities under „profitable“ conditions that are indispensible, in the given conditions, for the process of accumulation not to be interrupted [2]: the „volcano of production“ tends to be contrasted by the „swamp“ of a market that stagnates instead of widening. This is when the most violent of contradictions explodes: and the crisis of the system makes it necessary to turn to extreme and forceful solutions.
In the more industrially advanced countries, the entrepreneurial class encounters serious limits to the investment of the accumulated capital or a lack (or insufficiency) of local raw materials or domestic labour or markets where the commodities produced can be sold. Today, the provision of non-local raw materials, the hiring of foreign labour and the acquisition of foreign markets are processes that are far from being carried out satisfactorily by purely economic means or just by playing the competition and they require a constant effort to regulate and control buying and selling prices and the privileges gradually obtained through State provisions or „conventions“ between States. Since the end of the XIXth century, economic expansionism has turned from competitive into monopolistic, finding its expression in the form of finance, supported by powerful military back-up. It is a matter of controlling huge mineral resources or masses to be proletarianised or markets or areas where capital can be exported and it is power that decides the outcome of the race to grab, control or directly rule over ever increasing sectors of the world economy. The global manifestation of the ensuing clashes and crises is imperialism, which becomes manifest on an economic level in the process of concentration and whose point of arrival is the monopolistic control of production and exchanges, rule over finance and the exportation of capitals.
Through financial capital, the old and new powers fight on the stage of the world economy, ready to fling themselves into one adventure or the other, establish one form of alliance or another or threaten and attack one another, in the desperate attempt to react to the trend (which in times of crisis becomes manifest) towards the fall of the average profit rate. But this can only be achieved by insuring oneself and making the effort to maintain a position of power over competitors on an national and international scale. When they collide, this is when that mechanism typical of capitalism kicks in, a mechanism that is inevitable for it, which is armed conflict with its prologue of old alliances being dissolved and new ones coming into being. And the objective of this is not only to overcome the crisis at least temporarily to the detriment of an adversary and thanks to winning more advantageous positions in the exploitation of the resources and labour of the country or countries defeated, but also to launch again the cycle of capital accumulation through the wide-scale destruction of commodities and labour and the consequent orgy of reconstruction - an objective common to friends and enemies alike, belligerent and non-belligerent, winners and losers.
Over the past few years, the dynamics launched in the mid-1970s have matured, when, with the entire planet conquered by the capitalist mode of production, the phase of expansion of economic reconstruction following the second world war came to an end. The prognosis formulated by communist criticism proved to be correct: Capital cannot survive its own crises except by re-proposing a new and far deeper one.
Since 1975 up to the present, in a brief round of events, whilst the process of centralization of capitals was taking giant steps forward and the big industries restructured and made layoffs (a clear sign of the trend towards a drop in the average profit rate) and whilst the financialization of the economy proceeded at a gallop, the power relations commonly known as the „Yalta Agreements“ experienced their own crisis.
In the space of fifty years, in leaps and bounds, with new technologies and bubbles of speculation, new industrial establishments and radical restructuring, the international political-diplomatic expression of the economic „drama“ called into question the weight and thus the power of the old powers of earlier capitalist development. What is more, the process of decolonization of the old imperial set-ups, always within the framework of the imperialist phase, brought into being and nurtured new industrial powers that claim a new imperial political power, such as the People’s Republic of China. The conclusion of the so-called „Cold War“ between the USA and Russia reveals the economic fragility of the latter: despite the huge process of industrialization under Stalin, with all the atomic bombs and space adventures and the invention of so-called „real socialism“ opposed to, and presumed better than, „western capitalism“, Russia proves itself to be a power that survives mainly thanks to the exportation of raw materials, less so of commodities and virtually not at all of capitals. The USSR even breaks up due to penetration by promises and western capitals and the Russians are left with nostalgia and the chauvinism of the Holy Great Mother Russia: in its ferocity, the Special Military Operation in Ukraine is just a desperate attempt to consolidate western borders. The old European caryatids, divided between those who relaunched themselves during the post-war boom and those who, despite winning, found it more difficult to recover, have attempted to build a common market of capitals, commodities and labour, tendentially protected and looking outwards: however, chained to a NATO that is increasingly proving to be a tool of feudal vassalage to the USA, in any case reflecting the conflicting interests of twenty or so Collective Capitalists, they have neither the strength, nor the opportunity to provide an independent aggregation of power. As to the USA, they experience the agony of the decadent great power: protectionism and customs tariffs, military bases, attacks to „export freedom and democracy“ and sudden abandonments /Afghanistan!), not forgetting the wars imposed on their allies.
In this necessarily concise summary, we will certainly have forgotten something – perhaps even something important. We therefore refer our readers, old and new, to what we have published over the past fifty years of alternating crises in the world of capitalist production in its imperialist phase. The dynamics and groundlines remain the same. As do the areas of the planet where the forces of conflict are unleashed, with more or less intense seisms, the energy of clashes between the continental faultlines: the Middle East, sub-Saharian Africa, the Europe of the Balkans and the Caucasus. Bloody wars that drag on from truce to truce, amongst indirect clashes and direct hits, amongst changes of régime and the definition of fragile alliances, millions of human beings suffer the most ferocious aspects of imperialist dominion. But beware! This is not a matter of an abstract dominion, nor that of a malicious imperialist power, but of the particular dominion by the conflictual system of more or less fictitious States that consititute and deconstitute the so-called nationality of the younger bourgeois States, inherited from colonial rule exporting and establishing the capitalist mode of production.
From one imperialist war to the next, a third, inter-imperial war is thus being prepared. It will not be the accumulation of all these conflicts, which still retain local features and specific interests, and anyone who believes, like Pope Francis, that we are already experiencing „fragments of a third war war“ is making a big mistake! We have yet to see ourselves (even if we cannot predict how soon and how intensely) enter the spiral of war economy (characterised not only by military spending spending and rearmament alone) or the diplomatic contrasts and meetings to consolidate new power centres, disrupting the old ones.
But our science of social becoming, based on a criticism of political economy and the materialistic analysis of the history of our species is not limited to giving a more precise description of the facts. It is above all a militant and combative expression that transforms the immense mass of proletarians from victims and tools of the capitalist mode of production into a class that is the protagonist of the movement to change the existing state of affairs.
The route towards combatting the wars of capital starts out from fighting against the peace of Capital, and on the path of class struggle its waystages are clearly marked, just as the point of arrival is well known: through the development of proletarian defeatism (willing the defeat of ones own State and its allies, disobeying the military and political hierarchies in an organised manner and fraternising with our class brothers, keeping a close hold on arms first to defend ourselves and then to free ourselves from the tentacles of bourgeois institutions), transforming the war between States into social and civil warfare within States and opening up the process of communist revolution, the establishment of the proletariat as the ruling class.
September 2025
NOTES
[1] It should be noted that this same bipolarism had for years been put forward as a guarantee of „overall peace“ (apart from marginal conflicts sometimes breaking out), a sort of „balance of terror“!
[2] “On the other hand, too many means of labour and necessities of life are produced at times to permit of their serving as means for the exploitation of labourers at a certain rate of profit. Too many commodities are produced to permit of a realisation and conversion into new capital of the value and surplus-value contained in them under the conditions of distribution and consumption peculiar to capitalist production, i.e., too many to permit of the consummation of this process without constantly recurring explosions. Not too much wealth is produced. But at times too much wealth is produced in its capitalistic, self-contradictory forms” (Marx, Capital, Vol.III, Part III, Chapter XV: Exposition of the Internal Contradictions of the Law”).