Capitalism is international and global
The anti-capitalist Struggle must be international and global
(«Proletarian»; Nr. 1; February 2002)
Workers!
Capitalism is an international mode of production, which by nature, in its increasing development, penetrates all the nooks, even the most isolated, of the world. Born in the national bounds, it could only develop internationally. In its first stage of development, which squared with the period called «free competition», the industrial capitalism conquered the world and served as a springboard for the development of the financial capital, which, in the present imperialist stage, dominates all the economic, industrial, agricultural and commercial realms, all the big or small firms. The imperialist stage shows all the power of capitalism, which, revolutionary in the beginning, became afterwards and from a long time ago, counter-revolutionary. This transformation is not due to the tendency of capital to internationalize - a tendency historically revolutionary - but its basic limitation; not only is capitalism not able to resolve its own contradictions but it always worsens. In a word, it is not able to surpass itself; a crisis is only over when it has created the causes of crisis more serious and more widespread.
At the present time, in the imperialist stage, the interests of the big monopolist groups and of the big States have no longer as an arena the national market but directly the global market. Some tens of thousands of big trusts, based in the most developed capitalist countries (more numerous in Europe than in the USA), which dictate their trends to their national States, hold in their hands the destiny of all the human beings! The big monopolies, the big financial holdings, represented by the big imperialist States (USA, Japan, Germany, UK, France, Italy, Canada, Russia), transformed the «free competition» between firms on the global market into a competition between gigantic global financial oligarchies, which resulted in a gigantic increase at the level of the clash of interests at international level.
We shall not wait very long before a ninth country is added to these 8 countries: China. By reason of the importance of its national market, the latter no doubt means a short-term safety-valve for the global economy tortured by overproduction; but at a date not so far off, China will be an imperialist competitor of outstanding importance, increasing in this way the factors of crisis, contradictions and confrontations on the global scene.
With regard to the last century, it is not the type of economy that has changed: it is always capitalism, becoming developed at a superior stage. The general interest and the aims of capitalism - in so far as mode of production and society organized in its own image and for its profit - are basically always the same: accumulation of capital, production and reproduction of capital, against all difficulty, that is economic, social, environmentalist, cultural or military. The «globalization» is not a new stage, unknown, to capitalism; it is the expression of the process of imperialist development of capitalism, which has not yet been stopped and overturned by the international proletarian revolution.
CAPITALISM IS NOT REFORMABLE!
Workers!
Since the second imperialist global bloodbath, it is the theatre of the inter-imperialist conflicts that has changed. During 45 long years, the world was divided in two spheres of influence, the USA having acceded to the status of first global power. If this Russo-American condominium was not able to avoid the success of some big and hard anti-colonialist struggles, it was still successful in stopping the only genuine possibility of real struggle against capitalism - the revolutionary class struggle of the workers of all countries, united above the national borders built up by the different bourgeoisies to defend their specific interests. Now, more than ten years after the collapse of this condominium, with an economically weaker but more and more integrated Russia in the global market, and with China which is making giant strides forward towards the same integration, they would want us to believe that the most developed industrial countries, genuine masters of the world, have just one and only worry, to find between them a stable balance which could benefit all countries, including the poorest and the most deprived! There is no lie more impudent!
In Goteborg, Berlusconi, the new Prime Minister of Italy, says (and his Foreign Secretary repeated it) that the preoccupations of hundreds of the consortiums which contest the rule of the big international trusts and of their States, are the same as the preoccupations of these trusts and these States. Nobody believes it! What can be the result of the «dialogue» between the interests of the international financial oligarchies and the necessities of survival and development of the 150 countries whose the populations are reduced to hunger and to extreme poverty precisely because of the rule of these imperialist States and of thousands of «multinational companies» defended by these States?
As usual, the groups which contest the multinational companies’ supremacy (but which forget almost always the States which defend their interests on the diplomatic, economic or military plans) claim the right to the free determination of the peoples, to a «durable» development in a «fair» market: the illusion that it is possible to reform capitalism, to attenuate its sharpest contradictions under the pressure of a groundswell of opinion, of the mobilization of consciences, in a pacifist and interclassist bounds, is difficult to surmount.
Unfortunately, because of decades of interclassist opportunist stifling, the present-day youth cannot know the class tradition of the workers’ movement which brought to the foreground the defence of proletarian interests, through an open struggle, without thinking of begging the boss or of holding a dialogue democratically between «social partners» (i.e. employers and trade-unions). It was a warning that the enemy of class was not hesitating to use all means, from the dialogue to the repression, from the provocation to the reformist deviation, to obtain its basic aim: the social and political control of the proletariat.
Why is it vital for the bourgeoisie to submit the working class to its interests - always disguised under the mask of patriotism, of solidarity between the rich and the poor, of democratic debate and of pacifist coexistence? To have the power to extort from wage labour some bigger and bigger quantities of surplus-value, i.e. of profit, that the capitalist collects thanks to the more and more intense exploitation of the wage labour, genuine modern slavery.
And this exploitation increased enormously with the development of imperialism and of capitals «globalization», so much so that the most advanced capitalist States subjected to their interests, i.e. to those of the thousands of multinational companies, the many backward capitalist countries. The market is
as indispensable as the water for the fish: without market, the capital circulates no longer, multiplies no longer, and exists no longer. And on the market, the biggest and the most defended by the strongest States, endowed not only of complicated economic and political apparatuses but also of efficacious and vigorous armies, get the better of the weaker capital.
To believe that the market can become «fair» and «responsible», and owing to the willingness of the powerful, is like believing that the big fish can give up eating the smaller. It is not capitalism which decides the rules of capitalism: inversely, it is itself which is the product of capitalism! The different modes of production known to humanity have been the result of more or less long and complicated social transformations, not from the decision of some geniuses or leaders. It is for these historical and material reasons that the mode of capitalist production - therefore the market, the value, the profit, the money, the exploitation of the wage labour - cannot be diverted towards social aims which are not its own and that it cannot eliminate the necessary consequences of its own existence: the inequality between human beings, nations and States;
the wars; the increasing extreme poverty; the hunger and the despair for the most part of humanity; the pollution and the destruction of the environment.
And it is for some determined historical and material reasons that capitalism could be overtaken so as to give way to a really responsible and harmonious society - the society of human beings, communism - by means of the international class struggle of the workers of all countries, and at first of the workers of the developed capitalist countries which dominate the planet. The possibility of changing the world does not rest in bourgeois democracy, it does not fall within the domain of charitable and religious institutions, it does not depend on the willingness of the parties in power; it rests especially in the open anti-capitalist struggle that only the proletariat, the class of the wage slaves, could lead through its class and independent organization, its political party.
THE REVIVAL OF THE INDEPENDENT AND PROLETARIAN CLASS STRUGGLET IS THE ONLY WAY TO FIGHT INFAMIES OF CAPITALISM!
Workers!
To be against the rule of the multinational companies and especially of the 8 or 9 most powerful States of the world, in defence of the thousands of oppressed peoples, in defence of the environment and the life under all the skies is a first step of the criticism of the status-quo, of the resistance to the pressure and the oppression of capitalism against human beings. But continuing in the way of the reformist and democratic illusions, all these energies are doomed to failure; we will attend unavoidably at the reflux of the movements relating to the events of May 1968 or of the anti-nuclear movements: the bourgeois democracy with its thousand expedients can easily annihilate all the movements which did not break with it.
The most difficult but the most efficacious way of the anti-capitalist resistance and the struggle against all the oppressions - those of the national firms and the multinational companies, of the imperialist States outward of their borders and of the national States even weak, of the bourgeoisie of the country which colonizes us and of our own bourgeoisie - is the way of the class struggle: i.e. the struggle that leads the proletariat organized in defence of its only class interests, at first immediate and after more political and general. These are the material conditions of the waged workers existing everywhere on the planet, which objectively unite all the workers of the world.
It is the reason why the war cry of the revolutionary communism has been since its beginning:
WORKERS OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!
( Extracts from a manifesto distributed in Genoa on July 2001 )
International Communist Party
www.pcint.org