In the mystifying and mystified world of bourgeois politics, a series of recent events, which at first seem quite distinct from one another but do, in fact, converge, helps us to understand how, on an ideological level, the ruling class attempts to react to an economic crisis that is progressing day by day, accumulating increasingly explosive material in its depths.
Remember? They said that “this is, after all, the best of all possible worlds”, that “the welfare state has done away with differences”, that “globalization has brought wealth everywhere,” that “the working class is in heaven” and “the proletariat no longer exists” (and after the fall of the Berlin wall and the USSR, that “Communism is dead”). They were sociologists and politicians, economists, opinion leaders, philosophers and journalists, representatives of the right-wing, the centre and the “left” – all competing to spread false consciousness, illusions and delusions. In a word, hot air.
As we write (the beginning of September) the attack on Syria promised by “pacifist” Obama, followed dutifully by the tail-wagging “socialist” Hollande, with his nostalgia for past French imperialist glories, has not yet become operational. But this is irrelevant. The past twenty years have been a horrifying sequence of more or less uninterrupted, bloody wars, the massacre of civilian populations and open, state-perpetrated anti-proletarian terrorism. If and when the attack may be made and in whatever way (“limited” or “extended” in the cynical language of the military command headquarters and war-mongering politics), it would be just one more link in a chain of fire that has been closing around the throat of the world proletariat for some time now, moving closer to the citadels of capitalism every day.
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.
For the growth of capital, military expenditure is an absolute necessity. It is how the State finances the security its capitalists need to ensure themselves of sources of foreign wealth, the subordination of workers both at home and abroad, the direct and immediate use of natural resources, the management of factories and the power of national capitalism. To guarantee profits, the State “commandeers” nature and labour, not only at home but also worldwide. This is how military expenditure and the destructive power of an army truly become the real production force of capitalism, the real guarantee of continuity in the production process. Nagasaki, Hiroshima, Dresden, Berlin, Warsaw are exemplary sites of capital’s destructive power: nothing else!
