As long as there is capital, no peace is desirable, no war is less than infamous

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25 January 2013 Last Updated on 25 January 2013


The second world slaughter ended with the world being divided up amongst the triumphant  imperialist thieves.  The famous photo showing Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin, smiling and satisfied in Yalta in February 1945, is the most eloquent symbol of this.  Two areas in particular drew their attention, because of their potentially critical importance for “painlessly” opening up a new cycle of accumulation:  central Europe (and Germany in particular) and the Middle East.  The former would be divided in two and occupied by the victorious armies for fear of the revolutionary uprisings of the early post-war period repeating themselves (a similar “division”, this time of a more political-ideological nature, was made in Italy, where Togliatti’s “communist” party with its affiliations to Moscow and the newly-fledged, US-affiliated Christian Democrats literally shared out the territory, inside and outside Parliament); in the latter were planted the stakes of the new state of Israel, acting as the local police force and bound hand and foot to western imperialisms (but not only: the first State to recognize its existence, after having made active efforts to support its foundation and having provided the financing for arming it, was, not by chance, Stalin’s Russia) (1).

 

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The umpteenth massacre in the United States. It’s you we’re talking about…

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20 December 2012 Last Updated on 25 January 2013


Writing about the umpteenth massacre by a more or less adolescent and more or less solitary killer in a small town in the United States is a bit like shooting apples in a barrel at this point.  As expected, the twenty-eight victims (the great majority children) shot down between New Jersey and Connecticut in mid-December 2012 provided one more macabre opportunity for a fireworks show of interpretation by sociologists, psychologists, criminologists, politicians and politologists, priests and policemen.  There were those who brought up the Frontier as the historical source of this recurrent violence (and what bourgeois nation has not had its own “frontier” to use as target practice?  England in India, Ireland and half of Africa, Belgium in the Congo, France in Indo-China and Algeria, Italy in Libya and Ethiopia… the list could go on).  There are those who attribute the obsessive repetition of these outbursts of violence to the “diminished sense of religion” (in what is an authentic theocracy, with its churches, sects and confessions of all types and all dimensions, TV preachers and “live miracles”!).  There are those who lament the “collapse of respect for human life” (over half of the world, as we all know, drones, cluster bombs and landmines from the myriad of “humanitarian interventions” and “just wars” are all there to defend this “respect”!).  And so on.

Of course there is the “arms lobby”, too, which has always brought its weight (both economic and political) to bear: and so the beloved president of the moment, in tears before the TV cameras (everyone cries nowadays!), vows to limit the spread of … “assault weapons”.  The victims of the next attack are grateful: it’s quite another thing to be shot dead by “defence weapons”! 

 

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The enemy of the Palestinian proletariat is in Gaza City and in Jerusalem, in Tel Aviv as in Amman, in Damascus and Beirut as in Cairo and Tunis

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03 December 2012 Last Updated on 03 December 2012

Once again in the Middle East an enormous proletarian bloodbath is being prepared:  what we saw in mid-November 2012 was just a foretaste.  After a week of Israeli air- and sea-raids on the Gaza Strip, there have been 150 deaths, including women and children, amidst the destruction of houses and whole neighbourhoods.  A truce is agreed:  it may last, it may not.  They say that preparations are being made to intervene in Iran and for an attack in Syria.  Whatever happens, it is certain that fresh blood will be shed, so that Bourgeois Law and Order may make itself evident to a world shaken by unrest and proletarian struggles. Faced with the crisis of overproduction, which has been raging for five years now arousing as yet feeble responses from the proletariat, the imperialist States, terrorized by the merely remote possibility that the class war might explode and spread, are preparing the battleground, elaborating their strategies, taking the measure of their own strength and that of others involved.  Israel calls what is really an act of retaliation and the decimation of the civilian population “the right to self-defence”. It is not a question of Palestinians and Israelis, Jews and Muslims, but of proletarians used as a shield to defend a Bourgeois Dictatorship that is bound for destruction. 

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Exactly what is this abstentionism?

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10 December 2012


It is not the “specter that is haunting Europe” (that would demand much more) but everyone is talking about it.  The number of people who don’t turn out to vote is increasing, while the economic crisis, with its inevitable ups and downs, is deepening and spreading and everywhere (from Spain to Egypt, from France to Venezuela, from Hungary to Italy and so on, all around the world) election days, people’s consultations of all descriptions, democratic rituals of all types are proliferating – from the collection of signatures for one problem or another, right up to the huge, multi-million-dollar show of the U.S. Presidentials.  “Democratic mobilitation” is unceasing:  it echoes from country to country, amplified in all the media, creating a deafening noise and resorting to all sorts of brain conditioning, raising an immense cloud of dust that settles over everything, hiding reality from the eye.  At the same time, dazed by scandals large and small, revelations and disappointments, family quarrels and the rebounding of accusations and curses, faced with this huge World Festival of Democracy, the “people” turn out to vote in decreasing numbers, in line with a trend that was already evident in the “world’s greatest democracy”, the United States of America (save for the trend being suddenly reversed on one occasion or another, amidst general rejoicing).  

In the middle of it all, between the increasingly insistent recourse to the vote and the reaction of rejecting it, flourish groups, individuals and formations (which often wither quite quickly), in a range of different positions, going from “left” to right, with discourse marked by the most banal demagogic rhetoric, at times aggressive, populist, vulgar, at others made up of fine sentiments, concern and apprehension – always wavering between the two extremes (which are not extremes but Siamese twins):  the appeal to “more democracy” (“real democracy”, “grassroots democracy”, “people’s democracy”) and the manipulative amplification of all the reasons for disaffection (the “distance between the Palace and the real country”, the “rejection of Politics”, the “disgust for the Parties” and so on).

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An Antitode to the Big Barnum of the US Elections! ( In the words of Friedrich Engels)

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08 November 2012 Last Updated on 08 November 2012

 

Nowhere do “politicians” form a more separate, powerful section of the nation than in North America. There, each of the two great parties which alternately succeed each other in power is itself in turn controlled by people who make a business of politics, who speculate on seats in the legislative assemblies of the Union as well as of the separate states, or who make a living by carrying on agitation for their party and on its victory are rewarded with positions.

It is well known that the Americans have been striving for 30 years to shake off this yoke, which has become intolerable, and that in spite of all they can do they continue to sink ever deeper in this swamp of corruption. It is precisely in America that we see best how there takes place this process of the state power making itself independent in relation to society, whose mere instrument it was originally intended to be. Here there exists no dynasty, no nobility, no standing army, beyond the few men keeping watch on the Indians, no bureaucracy with permanent posts or the right to pensions. and nevertheless we find here two great gangs of political speculators, who alternately take possession of the state power and exploit it by the most corrupt means and for the most corrupt ends – and the nation is powerless against these two great cartels of politicians, who are ostensibly its servants, but in reality exploit and plunder it.

 

Friedrich Engels, “Introduction” (1891), to Karl Marx, The Civil War in France (1871)

See "The New US President and Suckers International Ltd.", Internationalist Papers, n.14.

 

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