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.
From the 1900s onwards this process of intensifying contradictions has been ongoing, though not as the fruit of the malevolence or madness of individuals, as mainstream ideology would have us believe. A continuous line joins all the wars (a sum total of conflicts) which may have had different protagonists and involved the major imperialisms to different degrees but all in the same direction: that of militarily discharging, by means of the growing destruction of goods, capitals and human beings, the crisis of over-production in which capital has been struggling since the mid ‘70s, without managing to extricate itself. The effect is therefore to unhinge the old balances without yet identifying new ones: this is the reason for the sense of volatility, uncertainty and fear that seems to be dominating the scene worldwide – the chaos that so disturbs and torments politicians and politologists, journalists and opinion-makers (as well as their sacrificial victim, the highly-praised „public opinion“!) and which translates into embarassing television debates and squabbles in bars. This is the chaos of capitalism in crisis, the world of Capital!
Nothing new to us. Contradictions between imperialisms are growing sharper, military spending is increasing, war propaganda is on the rise at all levels. Nationalistic, patriotic discourse is impregnating mainstream ideology (and doing so to the extent that not even individual States are able to go on creating stable alliances) and is spread under whatever pretext through all channels: from sporting competitions to music events, from advertising to TV talkrooms, etc.. Nonetheless, we should not confuse this „generalized warfare“ (or „fragmented third world war“, as some have seen it) with a third world war already taking place: though a new, inter-imperialist conflict is certainly being prepared in this way.
Nothing new. And the urgent need for the presence of a revolutionary party is growing, with clear indications to pass on to our class – a class that is still crushed under the weight of decades of counter-revolution, enfeebled, weakened, dispersed, but growing in number little by little and increasingly struck by economic and social crises, as well as by ever more widespread and crueller massacres. A proletarian class that is in fact international. As well as by the well-known events in the United States with the furious and homicidal aggression towards immigrant workers, this is demonstrated by another striking fact, becoming increasingly evident over the last few years and in the last few conflicts: death from bombing, in Iran as in the Lebanon and elsewhere in that war-torn area, not only the death of „locals“ but also and perhaps above all of proletarian immigrants from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and the Philippines, from Arab countries and other so-called „outlying“ ones – which are really not so at all, because the centre of Capital is everywhere by now.
We know only too well that under pressure from contradictions that are ever stronger and harsher, affecting the daily survival of proletarians and the masses undergoing proletarianization, this widespread and dramatic condition is destined to change from apathy to anger and to rebellion. For this very reason, revolutionary avant-gardes, the class party, must be there, but having previously prepared the terrain, so that anger and rebellion do not exhaust themselves or, worse still, take self-destructive paths, and so that they can be catalysed into true mobilization against imperialist wars and overthrow the capitalist mode of production that generates and fuels them. Briefly, so that social and political polarization comes about not on the basis of Fatherlands but according to the revolutionary struggle for a classless society, for communism.
Faced with Capital’s wars, all the chickens come home to roost. There are many examples of significant events that have taken place over time in this sense, with increasingly clear delineations. The „Kurdish question“ is a typical, tragic example (but we might remember others, too). Divided up into different geographical-national sectors, the Kurds – mas we have clearly shown in a recent article published in our Kommunistisches Programm and subsequently in these pages – now find themselves ranged on opposing national fronts. Will they end up fighting one another in the name of a common Fatherland to be created?!
Nationalism, however disguised, is the enemy to fight openly and without hesitation, however much of a minority we may be at the moment compared to the whole gathering of „fronts“ and „areas“, of „democratic and progressive patriots“, at times even cloaked as „socialists“, who inject the poison of nationalism into the veins of the proletariat.
Class against class, therefore, and not “nation against nation” or “people against people”! Only in this way can we find our way out of the dead end of Capital in its destructive crisis, with its periodic bloody massacres, which are only apparently crazy and incomprehensible.
20/3/2026
