Texts

The events that continue to follow on one another in the Middle East certainly don’t find us unprepared.  We have always pointed to that area (even before 1945, as can be seen in the pages of our Prometeo, published in the years between the two world wars) as one of those where the contradictions of capitalism are to be felt the most, exploding more and more frequently and violently – as happened in the Balkans around the time of the First World War.  Another area of increasing tension has its centre in Ukraine: so we might say that a single faultline of social and political instability links Europe to the Middle East.

As young proletarians from the banlieues angrily faced up to the cream of the French Republic’s repressive regime during recent riots, an aging and green-behind-the ears protester held up a banner featuring the slogan: “Disarm the Police”.

A metaphysically absurd demand.

The State isn’t some kind of body appointed to oversee the “collective good”. It is the “collective capitalist” that exercises the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and underwrites its monopoly of violence.

As we write, news come of the umpteenth possible truce in the State of Israel’s tragic war (lasting since 1948!) of extermination and ethnic cleansing in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Lebanon and the „Syrian“ Golan Heights. Of course, we shall return to the content of this possible truce and above all to its successive developments, without launching into the only too foreseeable merry-go-round of geo-political analyses and and hypotheses.  But some things should continue to be clear.  Whatever the immediate outcome of this bloody situation, another poisoned fruit of imperialist dynamics, it is evident that there will be no release, whether political, military or humanitarian.

In the metropolises of the States of older capitalism as well as in those of younger capitalism and in the peripheries of the whole capitalist world, the economic, living and working conditions of wage workers (and, subordinately, of the declining half classes and the proletarianized masses) continue to worsen, with generalized and constant increases in the cost of basic necessities, including housing, gas and electricity.

Everywhere, the restructuring of economic enterprises (multinationals, individually- or family-owned, cooperatives, state-owned, nationalized or of any other "business name"), induced by the irrepressible crisis of overproduction, generates more and more unemployment and precarious workers, and increasingly forces women back into the home, in underpaid work for the family, together with a more and more unsustainable increase in working hours and pace of work – the first and only cause of the growing number of homicides, serious traumatic injuries and illnesses in the workplace.