the internationalist

The abrupt “withdrawal” from Afghanistan by the United States which, after decades of “exporting democracy” (shady alliances, the financing and training of ambiguous groups and factions: in a word, the precise bases for the present chaos), reveal their own recurrent and equally elusive “vocation for isolationism”.    The pious rush to get out by the western powers which only yesterday were gathering in the country in large numbers to secure “good business” behind the shield of the Stars and Stripes, suddenly find themselves without protection.  The umpteenth proof of the  non-existence of Europe as a united political entity and its being instead a rocky terrain where obscene national egoisms clash and are indeed inevitable in the realm of Capital and Profit. The long arm of China and Russia extending towards a region of extreme geo-political and economic interest, with its rare landscapes, its oil and gas, its talc and, yes, its opium - a precious raw material for general stultification.  The role of bloody slaves played by the clans, the warlords, local bourgeois factions, always ready to put themselves into the hands and hire of one imperialist power or the other and change sides as soon as the wind veers in another direction.  Added to this pretty picture are the other tensions that continue to balloon and explode in the nearby Middle East or which break out in the not so far-away Mediterranean (such as the recent ones between Algeria and Morocco)…

“Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product. The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance, they are revolutionary, they are only so in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat”.

                                                                                                                                                                                The Communist Manifesto (1848)

Today. Great surprise has been caused by the so-called “gilets jaunes movement” (the yellow vests), arising in France in mid November, apparently out of nothing, and, reaching its peak at the beginning of December, subsequently losing momentum and potential for mobilization after the Government concessions of 10 December.

The umpteenth, ferocious massacre of Palestinian proletarians by Israeli imperialism, with the active and self-interested compliancy of the Arab bourgeoisies (represented first and foremost by Hamas and the Palestinian National Authority) and by European and US imperialisms, confirms once again, with bombs and bloodshed, that capitalism is war.

It is unceasing trade war and unceasing military war:  have we already forgotten Syria and Lebanon, Yemen, Mali and Tigray, an Africa prey first to the colonialists and then to the imperialists, a Middle East that has been a bloodbath for decades, Afghanistan, India, Pakistan - to quote only a few examples?

Imperialist dynamics and the Europeanist Illusion

In the post-second-world-war period, the weakness of Europe’s defeated or devastated ruling classes demanded the reconstruction of their economic, political and military apparatus.  The USA directed this reconstruction, which was warmly welcomed by the bourgeoisie in the defeated countries as the premise for renewed capitalist accumulation.  The Marshall Plan allowed national reconstruction to be launched, once the defeated had been obliged to set up an indefinable artefact called “Europe”.  In any event, it would be the “grande bourgeoisie” to install the project for “economic integration”and put it into practice in the defence of diverse national interests. The prospect of a “politically united” Europe was, instead, an illusion of the “petite bourgeoisie” in big European states, providing the “little ideals” and driven by the need for them to be widely involved in the process of capitalist development.