Comunismo, No.53, 2002

The Imbalance of Imperial Equilibrium Between Economic Crisis and Rumours of War

At the Pentagon, a special office has been opened whose task is ‘to provide news items, possibly even false ones, to foreign media organizations as part of a new effort to influence public sentiment and policy makers in both friendly and unfriendly countries’ (New York Times, 19 February). These efficient state officials – well countered by their adversaries in Europe, whose task, being today ‘pacifists’, is objectively easier and more ‘popular’ – have produced a series of blatant lies: one claims that 11 September 2001 changed the world and forced a change in the strategic choices of the U.S.A. in relation to the rest of the planet. Another that the collapses of the Enron and WorldCom trusts and other top American companies were due to corrupt accountants endowed with poor professional ethics. A third lie, with worldwide circulation, which linked Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda was later corrected: it is true that Saddam Hussein did not collaborate with the terrorist organisation, but he possesses such quantities of chemical, biological, and tomorrow even nuclear weapons that he could pose a threat to the entire world!

On the other side, a very wicked but composed Bin Laden appears punctually on the screens, whom no one knows where he is nor even if he exists, reduced to a purely cyber virtual, ascetic computer-generated image, complete with machine gun, turban, and ritual beard. But who moves the mouse, one can only speculate...

All this media frenzy to hide the fact that the causes that determine the evolution of the politics of imperialisms are, above all, economic. And they hide it 1) because it would be an admission that the capitalist economy does indeed follow coercive laws, according to which a crisis follows the cycle of economic expansion which suddenly takes on acute forms and which capital cannot remedy except by resorting to a Keynesian and military world slaughter; 2) because it would be an admission that bourgeois economists do not know what is really going on and no longer get even the slightest forecast right, even in the short term.

The United States’ diplomatic and military action is making it clear that relations between States unfold on the plane of force – military, economic, political – of brute force, of open violence. The strongest State arrogates to itself rights from which other, weaker States cannot defend themselves: the right to equip itself with nuclear forces; the right to enjoy an enormous foreign debt without any of its creditor States having any idea of demanding its repayment; the right of almost exclusive control over raw materials essential to capitalist industry; the right to intervene, even militarily, in other States judged to be ‘potential threats’ to its world hegemony...

Nothing new for Marxism, it only confirms our analysis of the relations between States, repudiated by the ‘democratic’ Stalinists since the 1930s.

Already in the weeks following the 11 September attacks, Washington’s highest representatives renounced the usual hypocritical masquerades of humanitarian war, in defence of peace and civilisation, and spoke openly of Washington’s willingness to go to war, to war tout court.

The authoritative voice of La Civiltà Cattolica is ‘astonished’ when it writes: ‘This is a theory, of “preventive war”, that cannot be accepted, because it would keep the entire planet in a state of permanent war (...) “Preventive war” does not serve peace, but rather places humanity in a state of permanent war, in addition to the very serious fact that the theory of “preventive war” is beyond the most ethically secure and universally accepted rules of international law’.

Even more indignant is an editorial by the euro-chauvinist windbags of Le Monde Diplomatique (October 2002) entitled ‘Vassalage’ which writes, referring to the American document, ‘this doctrine re-establishes the right to preventive war that Hitler applied in 1941 against the Soviet Union, and Japan, the same year, at Pearl Harbor against the United States... It likewise erases a fundamental principle of international law, adopted on the occasion of the Treaty of Westphalia, in 1648, which established that a State shall not intervene, and especially not militarily, in the internal affairs of another sovereign State’ (a principle already mocked in 1999 when NATO, Europe included, intervened in Kosovo...).

The purported ‘new’ doctrine openly set out in the document ‘National Security Strategy of the United States of America’, made public a few days ago, worries even the old grandees of the Italian Left. Pietro Ingrao, in Il Manifesto of 24 September, notes how Bush’s open declarations of war (‘we will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of selfdefense by acting preemptively’) have scandalised no one, that none of our politicians have dared even merely to recall that the ‘Italian Charter admitted only defensive war’. The fact is that even the ‘young lefties’ have realised that opposing ‘rights’ to ‘force’ is an enterprise of morons, or of dishonest hucksters, like Ingrao and his Bertinotti-style cronies. Or like Rossanda, for whom the document ‘is, in the strict sense, subversive of the epoch that followed the Second World War, which made the United Nations and its Charter the sole locus of decision and source of legitimation of relations between States. Not only does it erase the ban on any war that is not defensive, but also the principle, which seemed obvious after the slaughter, that nations would concert together the global objectives and the rules of the conflicts that arise within them’ (Il Manifesto, 6 October). It was obvious to such a breed, Stalinist or anti-Stalinist, of the PCI, PSI and leftist tail, who for half a century have set themselves to deceiving and deluding the working class that World Capital had any law other than its brute force in defence of its imperial egoisms.

For revolutionary communists there is nothing new in the doctrine of ‘preventive war’. It is the policy already adopted by Britain a century ago, as we summarised, for example, in an article ‘The USA’s European Policy’, published in Battaglia Comunista, No. 4 of 1949: ‘Flaunting an internal organization that was the hypocritical model of freedom and democratic practice, not having a standing army, while striving, through the imperial exploitation of the world, to achieve class collaboration with the native proletariat through reformist conceptions, Great Britain kept the first fleet in the world in arms and had in turn defeated the overseas empires of the Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch, plundering the planet. Vigilant in European conflicts, it used to intervene in time to bring down the feared political and military powers that could have exceedingly competed for the exploitation of the world’.

In another article, which appeared in Prometeo of 13 August 1949 ‘Aggression against Europe’, we made these remarks: ‘The bourgeois States and ruling parties coined the theory of living spaces, of preventive invasion, of preventive war [here we are referring to the First World War! ed.] justifying it with arguments of national health. All reasons not without real historical consistency, but which should not move revolutionaries, just as the reasons of defence and freedom of the most pure and innocent – if there were any – of capitalist governments should not move them. The 1914 war itself, trumpeted as Teutonic aggression, was a British preventive war. Every government sees where it wants its interests and living spaces (...) Wars can turn into revolutions on the condition that, whatever their evaluation, which Marxists do not renounce to carry out, the nucleus of the international revolutionary class movement survives in every country, completely detached from the politics of governments and the movements of the military General Staffs, which places no theoretical and tactical reservations of any kind between itself and the possibilities of defeatism and sabotage of the ruling class at war, that is, of its state and military political organisations.

Already in the 1920s, Lenin had defined the League of Nations as a ‘den of thieves’; the new organisation established at the end of World War II, the UN, has never been anything more than a fig leaf covering the worst misdeeds of imperialism. And this is how our Party has judged it, with extreme lucidity, ever since its establishment; in a brief note published in our newspaper Battaglia Comunista, No. 2 of July 1945, we wrote: ‘The San Francisco charter [where the constituent assembly of the United Nations was held] does not offer a method to prevent war, since war can only be prevented by eliminating its social and economic causes, but a new edition of the old and worn-out method of curing war with war (...) And in fact, if there is anything solid in the results of the Conference, it is not the magniloquent declarations of the participants, the oft-repeated pledges to work together on an equal and just footing to defend “human rights” or to regulate the political and commercial life of the world on the basis of treaties, but rather the sanctioning of a five-member alliance that forms the core of the Security Council and to which all the rest (the Assembly, the choreography of declarations, the Courts of Justice, etc.) serves only as a backdrop, a moral and legal justification, a spectacular embellishment. The truth is that the Big Five will be the supreme guardians of the world order, and since the Charter practically confers on them the right to intervene in the internal life of other countries whenever “measures necessary to maintain international peace and security” are required, this classic formula will justify the most regular political and military control over the political forces operating within the orbit of this world under tutelage. Not to defend “peace” but to defend “order”. Behind the olive branches there is a flower of tanks. Bourgeois peace has become motorised: only in this does San Francisco register an advance over Versailles’.

It is the responsibility of Stalinism and the National-Communist Parties linked to Moscow, for having peddled among the proletariat, firstly, that it was necessary to ally with Anglo-American imperialism in the Second War, secondly, that the end of that war would open a new era of peaceful collaboration among the states, soon to be called the theory of ‘peaceful coexistence’, based on the balance of terror imposed by the possession by the two bourgeois blocs of a massive nuclear missile apparatus. The revolutionary communists, even in those years, have always reiterated that nothing had changed in the relations among the capitalist states, that Lenin’s analysis of imperialism as the necessary and final phase of the capitalist regime remained valid, and that one could not delude oneself with the chimeras of international law, of peace, and of perpetual development propagated by the sirens of bourgeois power.

The doctrine of preventive war neither changes nor adds anything to the threat that all bourgeois military apparatuses pose represent for the world proletariat; the United States today constitutes only the largest among the many counter-revolutionary forces on the planet. The fact that they have decided to proclaim to the world their will, their need for war, only serves to confirm the classic theses of revolutionary Marxism.

We wrote in our latest Theses on Imperialist Wars: ‘Once the world market has been formed, and the restricted spheres of life and the circles of influence characteristic of precapitalism are dissolved into one economic magma of the production and sale of goods; once the markets of the whole world are saturated and the latest arrivals are squeezed into their corner of the market; in short, once the epoch of imperialism has been entered upon, wars of encroachment inevitably occur, with plunder and brigandage on both sides, for the division of markets and the subdivision and new distribution of finance capital’s spheres of influence, and just as inevitably, States and nations are brought into submission to the great powers as a consequence. Could the bourgeois governments and their leaders prevent war? No, there is no possibility that they could either provoke or prevent it. Even were it admitted that they don’t personally want war to break out, or that they don’t find it opportune to precipitate it, their intentions have little effect: the oligarchy of big capitalism, who they represent and on whom they depend, is constrained to act in production, industry, commerce and finance according to inexorable economic laws which lead to war. War is not a policy of a certain bourgeois stratum or party, it’s an economic necessity’.

The geographer Halford Mackinder at the end of the nineteenth century defined Central Asia the ‘heartland’ precisely because, according to his analysis, whoever possesses it controls Eurasia: China, Russia, India, Pakistan, and the Middle East are geographically inscribed within the circumference that has Central Asia as its centre. Certainly, this region has maintained its strategic importance, which, indeed, has increased with the discovery of oil and natural gas.

Since the mid-1990s, US energy companies had been setting up in Central Asia to extract and build oil pipelines for transportation. The pie, however, was contested among China, Russia, and Iran, with other minor players such as Pakistan, Turkey, Japan, and even Argentina.

After Russia failed in its attempt at military control of Afghanistan and was forced to withdraw from the country, a true coup de grâce to Russian imperialism, the centre of this semi-desert but crucial area of Asia was left without a master. At first, the Taliban mercenaries had represented the hope for the U.S.A. and Pakistan of a stabilisation of the state in their favour, but they later became, around 2000, one of the main causes of oil-narco-commercial-strategic conflicts in the area.

The 11 September attacks have lent the casus belli to a U.S. strike in the area. Under the pretext of the ‘war on terror’, the U.S.A. has militarily installed itself in the Central Asian countries, set up a pro-American government, if not in Afghanistan then at least in Kabul, and brought the Pakistani satrap Musharraf back in line. Above all, they have placed a decisive veto on the growing influences in the region of Russia, China, and Iran. ‘With the war in Afghanistan, the United States, flanked by its loyal British partner, have taken almost the whole of Central Asia, formerly Soviet, away from Moscow’s influence. They have thus been able to strengthen their own influence also in the Caspian region and, at the same time, restart the gas pipeline project which, through Afghanistan, will transport natural gas from Turkmenistan to Pakistan’ (Il Manifesto, 25 September).

China is now controlled by the United States not only through the bases in Taiwan and South Korea, but also with a well-equipped military base on its north-west border, in Kyrgyzstan to be exact (a base installed when the war with Kabul was almost over). The Russian magazine Argumenty i fakty wrote on this matter last January: ‘The military air bases in Central Asia represent a powerful means of pressure on China. It is to this country that American analysts link the growth of military confrontation between the two powers of the Pacific Ocean in the twenty-first century’.

Afghanistan has a fundamental importance also to Pakistan; it is considered necessary as ‘strategic depth’ in the not-so-remote eventuality of the escalation of the conflict with India over the Kashmir question. Consequently, the stabilisation of Afghanistan is a thorn in the side of the imperialist ambitions of India. On the other hand, if Russia, with the help of China, was trying to regain a hegemonic role in the region, it now instead finds the US military before it and a growing political and economic rapprochement of the governments of these countries toward the U.S.A., drawn by the mafioso scent of the Dollar, with which everyone and everything can be bought. The Central Asian states (Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan) are now no longer only disputed by the Asian powers but also, and much more decisively, by Washington. Thus, from the economic-oil point of view, the state of Turkmenistan, for example, will no longer have to sign energy contracts with neighbouring Iran or with Mother Russia: the U.S.A. will push the Turkmen state towards its own interests, with a connection to the Baku-Ceyhan oil pipeline or to one, much less reliable, that reaches Pakistan via Afghanistan.

In the Caucasus, the game of the U.S.A. is very similar to that conducted in Central Asia, in an anti-Russian, anti-Iranian, and anti-European function. Azerbaijan and Georgia have opened their doors not only to pipeline projects (which one day, if necessary, transporting oil and gas from the Caspian to Turkey, would take away all control of Caspian crude from Russia), but also to US military instructors in Georgia to train the local army and perhaps Chechen guerrilla groups. Just on 18 September, the U.S. Secretary of Energy attended the inauguration of the pipeline that will carry Caspian oil from Baku to Ceyhan, in Cilicia, on the Mediterranean, to Turkey, joining the one that since 1999 connects Baku to the Georgian port of Supsa on the Black Sea. ‘The pipeline follows a route that bypasses Russia to the south, taking away from it control over the export of most Caspian Sea oil’ (Il Manifesto).

The US military, by acquiring these positions, has moved close to the southern Russian border: Korean Peninsula, Central Asia, Caucasus, Turkey. The European Union is instead situated between Great Britain to the north-west and Turkey to the south-east. Now the U.S.A. is also aiming at a military reinforcement in Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Hungary, which would further close the encirclement.

The strategic motives of the war against Baghdad lie in the control of oil and, at the same time, of one of the key regions of the globe. Alberto Negri in Il Sole 24 Ore of 3 August considered that the aim of the conflict would be the ‘control of the Euro-Asian space, as well as supply flows and pipelines. If the United States is successful in doing what they have already done in Kabul in Baghdad, to replace a hostile regime with a friendly one, they will make the Middle East and Central Asia a single geostrategic area, a vast zone under their direct influence, a stranglehold from which, among the oil-producing countries, not even the Iran of the ayatollahs will escape’.

After the war in Afghanistan, this would be the second phase not of the ‘war on terror’, but for control of the oil-rich regions. ‘Contrary to original U.S. promises to its Arab allies, the 1991 Gulf War left behind large military bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and basing rights in the other Gulf states (...) The war also heightened the profile of existing U.S. air bases in Turkey. The war completed the American inheritance of the oil region from which the British had withdrawn in the early 1970s. Yet the U.S. itself only imports about 5 percent of its oil from the Gulf; the rest is exported mainly to Europe and Japan. French President Jacques Chirac correctly viewed the U.S. role in the Persian Gulf as securing control over oil sources for the European and East Asian economic powers. The U.S. decided to permanently station bases around the Gulf after 1991 not only to counter Saddam Hussein, and to support the continued bombing against Iraq, but to quell potential internal dissent in the oil-rich monarchies’ (Grossman).

The US Department of Energy is bringing the strategic fuel reserve back to its full capacity of 700 million barrels, enough for 80 days of the country’s needs, as a precautionary measure against a total import blockade.

One of the most important factors for the United States of America is that of the control of energy production in the world, in order to exclude the blackmail of any insufficiently loyal rentier states (e.g. Saudi Arabia, a ‘terrorist hotbed’). Moreover, in many Middle Eastern countries there are growing masses of lumpenproletarians and proletarians in desperation who require efficient military and police control. By controlling energy sources, the U.S.A. would control the entire planet and in particular its economic adversaries, the European Union, Japan, and China at the forefront.

The United States has euphemistically defined its action of hoarding as a ‘vital need’ to diversify its sources of supply; the US energy secretary inaugurating the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline declared that ‘The energy policy established by President Bush requires that the United States support the increase of energy production throughout the entire world. It is fundamental for America’.

Naturally, the control of the sources of the raw material would allow Washington to influence the price of oil. The price increase consequent upon the war could slow down all Western economies that are already in crisis when not in open recession, but it would especially hit the economies of those countries that are most dependent on imports, Europe, Japan, and China. Domingo Solans, one of the executives of the European Central Bank, states: ‘The risks regarding the price level are contained for the moment, but the situation is very uncertain, every negative development in the Middle East, with the consequent increase in the price of oil, would change the data’.

Some analysts in the West see the overthrow of the Iraqi regime and the transfer of oil into the hands of the United States as a positive development that would put the West in a position to respond to the blackmail of OPEC, which, as recently as 19 September in Osaka, Japan, decided not to increase production despite the price of crude oil having broken through the $30 per barrel ceiling. Perhaps they have not read the Washington Post of 15 September: ‘A U.S.-led ouster of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein could open a bonanza for American oil companies long banished from Iraq, scuttling oil deals between Baghdad and Russia, France and other countries, and reshuffling world petroleum markets’. The United States, therefore, could prove to be more demanding masters than OPEC itself, and with the military capabilities to enforce their diktats.

Exploiting Iraq’s black gold – Le Monde comments – is an objective that oil tycoons around the world have pursued for a long time. The new Eldorado described in Central Asia does not change anything for a very simple reason, the production cost of a barrel from the Caspian Sea fluctuates between $7 and $8, Iraqi crude costs 70 cents per barrel. The oil companies’ interest in the Iraqi subsoil has no reason to weaken.

Iraq has proven reserves of 115 billion barrels of oil, second only to those of Saudi Arabia. At present, it is Russian companies that are very active in Iraq, but also China, an oil importer and the third largest consumer in the world after the USA and Japan. The West also buys Iraqi oil, and it seems that every day between 200 and 300 thousand barrels are smuggled to Turkey, Jordan, Syria, and Iran, with ‘off the books’ revenues estimated at between 600 million and two billion dollars, which would be collected directly by the family of Saddam Hussein. The United States also buys Iraqi oil, officially in small quantities (167,000 barrels per day) but, according to other sources, the amount of oil that would reach the US ‘enemy’ every day would be as much as 1.2 million barrels!

Oil is an energy source that seems destined to still remain fundamental for the capitalist economy, at least for a few decades. The report of the International Energy Agency, an OECD body, has indeed predicted that for the next thirty years, fossil fuels will still provide 90% of energy, and it will be Middle Eastern oil that will cover an increasingly large part of the world’s energy needs.

Meanwhile, one of the classic bastions of the U.S.A. in the region, Saudi Arabia, the world’s leading oil producer, is gradually distancing itself from that close link. Not only is the domestic economic crisis leading the Saudis to a growing impatience toward U.S. presence in the region, but above all, the American energy strategy, of weakening and controlling producers, harms the interests of the Prophet’s Homeland. Saudi Arabia’s productive and commercial supremacy is threatened by a future resolution of the Iraqi problem (which would allow at least the tripling of its crude oil production) and by the Russian ambition to become the world’s leading producer. In this sense, the latest energy collaboration contracts between Moscow and Washington, and the Second Iraq War, are seen as opposing Saudi Arabia.

Tarek Aziz, Iraqi deputy prime minister, declared on 18 September in Baghdad: ‘The American administration, by putting forward pretexts to launch an aggression against Iraq, seeks to control the region in order to steal its wealth’ (Le Monde, 19 September). Saddam Hussein was even more explicit (by now he has little to lose): ‘American animosity against us is explained by the fact that if they destroy Iraq they will control the oil of the entire Middle East, which accounts for 65% of world reserves, and therefore they will be able to govern the economic growth of every nation in the entire world’ (La Stampa, 3 September) and ‘Bush wants to control the oil of the Middle East, the economic and oil policies of the entire world, to establish how much oil each country needs for its own development, how much it can buy, and at what price’ (L’Unità, 24 September).

Iraq is a country of 23 million inhabitants subjected to an economic blockade as well as a vicious bourgeois military dictatorship for more than eleven years, since the end of the first Gulf War.

Despite the fact that it is potentially one of richest countries in the Middle East, as it has enormous oil resources as well as vast areas of fertile and partly irrigated land, the living conditions of the vast majority of the population are miserable. According to data reported by the monthly magazine Mani Tese, the average gross domestic product per capita fell from $2,800 to $247 per day from 1989 to 1999; electricity production from 9,552 to 4,350 MW, access to drinking water fell from 93% to 47%; daily available calories decreased from 3,089 to 2,100. This is said to have led to a sharp increase in diseases, cancers, also caused by depleted uranium bombs, etc. Naturally, it is the proletarians and the poor masses who pay the highest price. ‘Denis Halliday, the UN Assistant Secretary-General in charge of humanitarian aid, resigned, declaring the embargo on Iraq a “genocide”. His successor, Hans von Sponeck, has also resigned. Last November, the two wrote that “[t]he death of some 5-6,000 children a month is mostly due to contaminated water, lack of medicines and malnutrition. The US and UK governments’ delayed clearance of equipment and materials is responsible for this tragedy, not Baghdad”’ (Limes).

This state of affairs has so far strengthened the regime instead of weakening it because it can easily offload the causes of poverty and oppression onto Western countries.

The United States and Britain have not provided any substantial evidence of the alleged Iraqi rearmament and of the links between the regime and al-Qaeda terrorists. On the contrary, many among the UN inspectors themselves confirmed that Iraqi war capabilities had been reduced by 95% during the war. Furthermore, in the following years, the embargo and the continuous control of the territory with aircraft and satellites leads to the conclusion that Iraq could not have equipped itself with a new war device. In this regard, one must remember that ‘Iraq is a country amputated of two thirds of its airspace and three quarters of its Kurdish region, which constitutes a separate “security zone”, excluding Mossul and Kirkuk, the heart of the oil region’ (Le Monde).

The alleged links between Saddam Hussein and the al-Qaeda organisation, indicated as being responsible for the New York attacks, proved equally unprovable. Some commentators have in this regard asserted that Saddam, a secular dictator, fiercely fought against these Islamist organisations, which, until a few years ago, were instead financed and sponsored by the United States.

The United States has been preparing the attack for months now. In fact, the war has already begun as the British and US air forces systematically bomb ‘the centres, fixed or mobile, of command, control, and communications that contribute to Iraqi defence’ (Le Monde, 24 September). The latest news reports the bombing of the civilian airport in Basra and daily attacks on military and civilian targets. ‘For the war on Iraq’, writes General Fabio Mini in Limes, ‘everything is almost ready. The USA already has the attack plans ready and up to 200,000 soldiers deployable in the medium term. The British can deploy up to 25,000 men in a short time and another 25,000 in four or five months’ (Waiting for Saddam, special issue of Limes, No.1, 2002).

The enormous war machine is now in full swing to prepare the attack on Iraq. The brain that will direct the coming war is located at the Al-Udeid military base, near Doha, Qatar, where part of the headquarters, whichis normally stationed in Tampa, Florida, is being relocated (estimated cost for the new infrastructure is 1.5 billion dollars); the base should be prepared to house 3,000 troops, combat aircraft, and Global Hawk or Predator spy planes. Other troops are deployed in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, at the Incirlik airbase in Turkey, and on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean where six (or possibly more) American B2 bombers are stationed. It is estimated that by mid-October, 60,000 troops will be deployed in the area, not counting those (aircraft, helicopters, and commandos) embarked on a squadron of six aircraft carriers that is due to arrive in the Persian Gulf before the end of the year. The territory of Iraq is also monitored by six spy satellites (each costing one billion dollars).

But the problem, for Washington and allies, is not to succeed in destroying the Iraqi armed forces and ousting Saddam: the Iraqi army, made up of impoverished proletarians who have no interest in dying to defend their oppressors, lacking artillery, missiles, and aviation, has no possibility of putting up resistance to the attack. The problem for the ‘liberators’, who appear ‘democratic’ but ‘Western’ and ‘infidels’, is that of occupying the territory, of setting up a new government capable of ensuring social and political stability, while remaining inextricably linked to the United States. Tens of thousands of American soldiers would have to be stationed in the country for a long time, just as happens in ‘liberated’ Afghanistan, where the pro-American government in Kabul would not last a single day if it did not have thousands of occupation soldiers (including Italian military units), Western cannons and aircraft to defend it. The same problem had arisen in Washington at the end of the First Gulf War, when the inflamed social situation in the south of the country and the restlessness of the Kurds in the north convinced the Pentagon gurus to leave in place the demonised Saddam himself, who, as a butcher, had and has nothing to learn, and immediately proved it by sending the battalions of the Presidential Guard to crush, undisturbed, the proletarian revolt in the south of the country.

This time, the American Administration does not want to repeat the mistake; Secretary of State Colin Powell is even thinking of emulating the methods followed in Japan or Germany at the end of the Second World War: turning Iraq into a protectorate administered directly by the US Army. An alternative would be the imposition of a new (perhaps even blue-blooded) dictator devoted to Washington.

The U.S.A. is already selling the skin of the Iraqi bear: former CIA director James Woosley has openly declared that the countries that will be part of the anti-Iraqi coalition will be privileged when it comes to sharing out the oil loot, and Washington has promised Moscow that whichever government comes to power in Baghdad will pay off the $10 billion debt that the current regime has contracted with Moscow (the American guarantee!).

But there are those who argue that getting their hands on the black gold will take time even after a victorious war that ousted Saddam and imposed a puppet in his place. Iraq in fact produces about 1.5 million barrels a day. It has a current production capacity of between 3 and 3.5 million, but even if the war did not cause the destruction of the wells, it would take at least two years of investment to get there. Doubling the extraction capacity, on the other hand, i.e. from 3 to 6 million, would require 4 to 5 years and, according to Le Monde of 28 September, an investment of 20-30 billion dollars. In addition to this, ‘the fundamental condition for these prospects is obviously the stability and compliance of the regime that will succeed Saddam toward the Western companies. International companies would have to invest three billion dollars to develop the Magnun field, and that sum is not invested without a guarantee of stability and favourable conditions’ (Limes).

The capitalist system has today entered into a worldwide crisis, probably the deepest since the 1929 crisis which could only be resolved by the Second World War. It is the most highly industrialised countries, Japan, Europe, and the United States, that have the most to lose from the crisis.

U.S. industrial production, according to the Federal Reserve, from an index of 146.8 in September 2000, gradually began to decline: by August 2001 the index was already at 140.0 and in the following November at 137.1. Many sectors were affected: the technology sector, on a year-on-year basis, from +4.63% in June 2000 dropped by -15.6% in November 2001; motor vehicle production, in the same span of time, fell by 12%; from 2000 to the beginning of 2002 steel production fell by as much as 19%. Industrial production in general fell by 3.7% in 2001, compared to a drop of just 0.1% in the Eurozone.

In terms of Gross Domestic Product, it can be seen that the US economy actually recovers right after 11 September 2001: in the first quarter of 2001, GDP had fallen by 0.6%, and in the second quarter by as much as 1.6%, in the third quarter it was still down by a modest 0.3%, and in the fourth quarter (the quarter after 11 September) GDP returned to rise with a substantial +2.7%, followed by an even more substantial +5% in the first quarter of 2002. In the second quarter of this year GDP rose by 1.1%.

The stock market crashes, as is known, have been quite large with the Dow Jones index dropping 33% between January 2000 and September 2002 and the Nasdaq index, which from March 2000 to September 2002, even dropping by 75%, proving among other things what we have always written about the fallacious character of the New Economy.

The Republican government, as expected, quickly dispelled the doubts about its libertarian inclinations – which are instead imposed on countries like Argentina! – and intervened massively to support and protect national industrial and agricultural production, so much so that it went from a surplus of $250 billion in 2000 to a deficit of $147 billion in June 2002.

The accumulated debt of the United States has reached the enormous figure of 18 trillion dollars; the annual trade deficit runs to 400 billion and the balance of payments deficit now reaches 450 billion dollars. The debt of the foremost capitalist power has thus become the highest in the world, and there arises in us a communistic smile at the thought that if one is the strongest... An ultra-indebted State is in the destiny of a society on its way to its end: from the Roman Empire to the French Monarchy of 1789.

Since the early post-war years, our party considered how the power of the U.S.A. over the world was firm precisely due to the fact that it was the world’s main creditor, in that phase of reconstruction and Marshall Plans.

The causes of the present crisis do not lie in the mistaken choices of the head-banker or of the government of the day, but in the very nature of Capitalism, which is compelled to always produce more, without being able to stop: its damnation lies in the fact that this volcanic production must reckon with a market that is unable to follow its insane rhythms. In practice, too much is produced and one cannot do without it, on pain of the collapse of the entire economy. Thus too many means of labour is also produced so that the bourgeois ‘productive investments’ jam before a valorisation that becomes increasingly difficult to realise. The annual growth of productive investments in the U.S.A. amounted to +15.8% in the first quarter of 2000, in the second quarter of 2001 (before Mohamed Atta and his associates passed the check-ins) investments had already plummeted by 14.6%.

American hegemony is being challenged by competitors. The European Union (excluding Denmark, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and Greece from the calculation) now accounts for 16.6% of world exports (Germany alone as much as 8.8%!), against 15.2% for the U.S.A. and 8.0% for Japan. The export of manufactured goods by Germany and France alone amounts to 759 billion dollars against 577 of the U.S.A. While the industrial production of the U.S.A. is worth 2,613 billion dollars, the EU-15 follows it with 2,143, and Japan with 1,582.

We wrote in 1991 in our study on The Course of World Capitalism in the Historical Experience and Doctrine of Marx 1750-1990 (p. 89): ‘The existence of a formidable world centre of economic and political power is vital for the stability of the capitalist economy. This function was carried out initially and for a long period by England. Subsequently, as a consequence of the decline of Albion, no longer able to fulfil that task, to the point that an extremely dangerous period of destabilisation for the general equilibrium was seen arising, said function was transferred to the United States, which now had such an apparatus of strength as to guarantee with a more marked incidence another long phase of conditions favourable to Capital to further increase expropriations, plunders, and pillages to the detriment of the planet and of the living beings that populate it. Economic laws proper to the capitalist system are making us witness the progressive weakening, for the United States, of its function as a world centre able, from a position of preponderant force, to ensure stability, to guarantee confidence and balance to the prevailing system’. The study continued, observing that ‘A new centre of power, appropriate to the times, to replace the one that is slowly but inexorably wearing out, as of today does not exist’. Ten years later the crisis has deepened, a new centre of power effectively alternative to the U.S.A. still does not exist, and the struggle is still open.

Obviously, the passage of the historical relay of world hegemony will not take place through verbal clashes and diplomatic diatribes, nor through decisions of supposedly super partes international bodies, which cannot exist; it will take place, if it takes place, through the clash between powers in a new world slaughter, just as the hegemony of the Dollar economy over that of the Pound consolidated itself through no fewer than two world wars. The alternative, the only one, is that the international proletariat takes the initiative into its own hands, putting revolution back on the agenda and sending all contenders to the dogs.

Instead, the innumerable interpretations about the new nature of power in the United States, about the unique future Empire, dominant and unchallenged, theories that ignore every necessity and dialectic of the capitalist-imperialist economy, show no consistency. The invincible U.S.A. does not sail in good waters. Their vulnerability is recognised by international capitalists and speculators who increasingly avoid investing in the United States. This growing flight of foreign capital is decidedly serious to happen right now as that money is needed by the American state to finance its debt. If it is true that the U.S.A. remains the ‘locomotive’ of the world economy, imagine what we have to look forward to from the... trailing carriages!

It is noted that: 1) the U.S. economy is losing ground compared to the economies of many newly industrialised countries and, contingently, even compared to European countries; 2) profit prospects in the U.S.A. are lower than elsewhere: from 1997 to 2001, profit margins in the U.S. have drastically decreased; 3) the bankruptcies with related Enron, WorldCom, and other multinational corporation scandals, quantifiable in hundreds of billions of dollars, have eroded investor confidence.

The fact remains, however, that while the United States is today closely pursued in the economic field in world markets, it is, for the time being, unchallenged politically and militarily; there is no single state or even a front of states that can compare with it in terms of military power today. It is on this level, therefore, that Washington can move in order to defend its supremacy.

For some years now, the military budget of the United States has been on the upswing and has soared since the fateful 11 September 2001. ‘The dividends of the war on terror’, we read in Il Manifesto of 11 September, ‘promise to be enormous, given that the contracts are set against the backdrop of a defence budget that for the 2002 fiscal year (1 October 2001-30 September 2002) allocates for the sole items “Acquisitions” (weapon systems, munitions, various types of services and transport), “Research and Development” (financing the development of new systems) and “Construction” (bases, airports, etc.) alone, 61, 48, and 6.5 billion dollars respectively out of a total of about 330 billion dollars in the budget and total allocations of 353 billion dollars. It will not escape notice, in this regard, that Iran today has a gross national product of about 120 billion, Egypt barely reaches 90 (slightly less than Israel), and Iraq had one of about 12 in 1996 (...) The Pentagon budget, according to the Bush administration’s request, will increase by 45.5 billion dollars (+13%) to 379.3 billion dollars in fiscal year 2003, plus 16.8 billion dollars allocated by the Department of Energy for the maintenance of the nuclear arsenal; in total over 396 billion dollars, about half of world military expenditure. According to the official estimate updated as of June 2002, the total expenditure for the 70 weapons systems under acquisition is about 1,119 billion dollars (...) Expenditure is expected to increase by 48 billion dollars next year (from 331 billion dollars to 379 billion dollars, a 14% increase) and by more than a third, to 451 billion dollars, by 2007. These are the strongest increases in twenty years’.

But, in the face of this recovery in the domestic market, the American arms industry, the first in the world of course, is scaling down its dominance in the export sector. According to SIPRI, the Stockholm-based research institute ‘on disarmament’ (sic!), while in the five-year period 1997-2001 the United States was by far the main seller of arms (worth 44.8 billion dollars against Russia’s 17.3), in 2001 Russia overtook the USA by selling arms worth 5 billion dollars against the USA’s 4.5; China also had a surge, coming in at 600 million dollars.

The uncertainty of war sends the stock markets reeling, but a short war, of limited impact, would be welcomed by economists and by the markets. ‘A short-lived military action, limited to Iraq, would probably have a limited impact on the growth rate’ and could indeed produce ‘positive effects’, states International Monetary Fund Managing Director Horst Köhler, because it would lead to a ‘clarification of the situation’. Here is the moral of bourgeois ‘pacifism’: war is an evil, but if it serves to ‘clarify the situation’, which allows one to make money, so be it! On the contrary, ‘The widespread threat, the unclear situation, makes investors hesitant’ and a long and uncertain war in its outcome could create an unpredictable situation with negative effects on the economy.

If, in fact, Washington were to succeed in the ‘jackpot’ of a rapid operation in Iraq and the establishment of a pro-American government, a decisive boost would also be given to global distrust toward Washington: its ailing economy could benefit from a new climate in which companies and commodities ‘made in the USA’, the dollar included, would be favoured insofar as they are well protected by a strong policy. The fact that it will then basically be the U.S.A. that sets the world’s oil and natural gas prices would render the economies dependent on crude imports open to blackmail.

‘As the Cold War ended’, considers Zoltan Grossman in Wars & Peace September 2002, ‘the U.S. was confronted with competition from two emerging economic blocs in Europe and East Asia. Though it was considered the world’s last military superpower, the United States was facing a decline of its economic strength (...) [and] faced the prospect of being economically left out in much of the Eurasian land mass’. But even in this field, US hegemony is threatened: China has already been set on the road to economic competition with the USA for a decade; the Euro replaces the Dollar in OPEC’s vaults; Russia strengthens its ties with the Middle East.

Therefore a short war would relieve things from the unfavourable contingency, but it is a long and destructive war that the capitalist regime needs in order to overcome the general crisis of overproduction suffocating the world economy. The world proletariat, ever poorer but ever more numerous, would pay the price.

The US initiative for a new war on Iraq does not find the agreement of the other member states of the UN Security Council this time, with the exception of Great Britain alone, nor of the most important countries in the region. The change in the political ‘climate’ and in the relations among the major powers is conditioned above all by the attitude of the United States, which has repeatedly stated that it is prepared to go ahead ‘alone’. This change in Washington’s political attitude towards allies and adversaries is determined by the change in the balance of power worldwide.

The United States emerged from the titanic ordeal of the Second Imperialist War as by far the most powerful state in the world. Mammarella writes in Storia d’Europa dal 1945 ad oggi: ‘As a consequence of the war effort, industrial production was doubled in a few years. By the end of 1945, the United States, with 7% of the world population, was producing 50% of electricity, 50% of its coal, and 75% of oil. In other productive sectors, the percentages were even more overwhelming and, overall, two-thirds of the industrial potential existing in the world was concentrated in the United States (...) This predominant position led the US ruling class to embrace Wilsonian principles based on collaboration between nations guaranteed by international law, the creation of a world trade system founded on free trade and free access to raw materials (...) The new international order was seen not only as a matter of faith in a better world, but also as a matter of necessity. Among the representatives of the Rooseveltian establishment there was a growing conviction that the United States needed that internationalism in order to resolve the economic problems that would arise with unpostponable urgency once the war was over. They were mainly the problems of the search for new outlets and new markets towards which to channel America’s enormous productive capacity, which the domestic market, it was thought, would not have been able to fully absorb, but also those arising from the gradual depletion of domestic sources of raw materials which, used at an ever-increasing rate, led experts to hypothesise an economy increasingly dependent on foreign countries for the future’.

The situation in the last half-century has changed, the enormous development of industrial production, the astonishing rebirth of the countries that came out defeated and destroyed from the war, Germany and Japan as well as Italy, the recurring crises of overproduction, push towards a resumption of the antagonism between states. These economic transformations begin to be considered dangerous by the more shrewd American bourgeoisie and today it becomes a necessity for it not only to defend its own commodities in the world, but above all to position itself at the various nodal points of the planet in order to prevent and possibly try to anticipate the possible emergence of a future political power that could counter US dominance. In this regard, there are several American scholars who fear the actual emergence of future enemy states, which would be not so much the ‘rogue states’ (North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Libya), but economic giants such as China, Japan, Russia, or the European Union and, in it, Germany. The C.I.A. has recently published a study predicting a future world conflict in not even fifteen years, mainly between powers such as China, the European Union and, of course, the United States.

The U.S.A. still has full, and for now unchallenged, initiative on the world chessboard, but the other imperial blocs are not standing idly by. The ruling classes of these countries are aware that Washington is working for its own exclusive interests, but the enormous US repressive apparatus represents the only true defence against the spectre that now terrifies the entire world: it is not Islamic terrorism but that of the proletarian giant that could awaken at any moment. Hundreds of millions of proletarians are involved, and every day more, in the infernal cycle of capitalist production and the market, every day, under the blows of the economic crisis, the insecurity of tomorrow grows, and the democratic, pacifist, militarist, racist, or religious opium, sprinkled on top of it, suffices less and less to make people endure oppression and exploitation.

This terror of the proletarian awakening has so far kept the major imperialist countries from openly denouncing the global arrogance of Washington, but the arrogance of the latest American moves makes many think that the price of ‘protection’ is too high...

Europe is aware that the war on Iraq will be to its disadvantage, but is still incapable of a united position: Great Britain immediately sided with the U.S.A., followed shortly by the governments of Spain and Italy (but their political colour has nothing to do with it: against Serbia there was D’Alema!). Germany has expressed its strong objections to the war, France has reiterated the centrality of the UN (also because it is one of the permanent members of the Security Council). President Prodi sends signals of hardening towards the U.S.A. and calls for the defence of the ‘sacred borders’. Giuliano Amato correctly writes in Il Sole 24 Ore on 15 September regarding his European Union: ‘It is quite possible that we will split into two camps in the face of a military intervention by the United States alone (...) I would not like the worst-case scenarios in the evolution of the Iraqi situation to kill before the baby that the Brussels Convention is conceiving is even born’. If with the war in Iraq, and its slow and deliberate preparation, the U.S.A. were to succeed in the blow to divide the European Union, it would perhaps be the greatest of victories for them.

One of the always indignant editorials of Le Monde Diplomatique, quixotic champion of chimerical national independence, sovereignty, democracy, writes in this regard: ‘In the atmosphere of intimidation of this eve of war against Iraq, many European leaders (from Great Britain, to Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Portugal, Denmark, Sweden...) perhaps without even having become aware of the structural change underway, react with a canine reflex, adopting towards the American Empire the attitude of servile submission that is due to loyal vassals. And while they are at it, they sell off national independence, sovereignty, and democracy wholesale. Mentally they have crossed the line that seperates the ally from the feudal lord, the partner from the puppet. For their armed forces, in the battle that lies ahead, they beg for an inglorious supplementary role. And if possible, after the American victory, a drop of Iraqi oil’.

Russia has shown itself to be an opponent of the war, positioning itself as the leader of the Paris-Berlin-Moscow axis, and the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Igor Ivanov, reiterated again on 26 September that ‘Only specialists can judge whether there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq’ and recalled that Moscow seeks to obtain an immediate return of the inspectors in Iraq and that one must wait for their conclusions in order to decide what to do.

But Russia today is economically worth a quarter of China, its GDP is about 5% of the US or European GDP. Russia is going through a phase in which it has returned from the preponderance of industrial production to an economy based on the extraction and export of raw materials. Its economy needs foreign investment in order to modernise at least part of that 60% of industry that is based on outdated or even non-functional machinery; it needs investment to extract minerals at competitive prices; it needs a significant buyer of oil and gas such as the U.S.A.; and it needs to decently extricate itself from the Chechen crisis and the pitfalls coming from Georgia, a state whose independence Washington has made itself guarantor but which is accused by Moscow of protecting and hosting Chechen terrorist bases. Putin recently threatened direct military intervention in Georgia precisely to eliminate those bases.

Washington could moreover promise the Russian oilmen, who have great influence over the president, to share Iraqi oil with them. Therefore Washington has many cards to play in order to soften Russian attitude. Will Moscow sell out its Iraqi ally for a cheque with a lot of zeros?

Even China, with oriental prudence, expresses its opposition to the war, requesting that the UN intervene.

Another unenthusiastic country is Turkey, which is, however, closely linked to the United States. Former Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit, before the last elections, had made some statements opposed to the intervention. The Turkish bourgeoisie fears that the war and the overthrow of Saddam’s regime could provoke a revival of Kurdish independentism; the Kurds in fact claim the region comprising the provinces of Kirkuk, Mossul, and Erbil in Iraq, and it seems that the two major Iraqi Kurdish parties, Massud Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party and Jalal Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, after having fraternally slaughtered and denounced each other to the enemy for ten years, have reached an agreement to support the establishment of a federal state in an autonomous region with a Kurdish majority. Despite these fears, even after the election victory of the Islamic AKP Party, Ankara could do nothing but reaffirm its presence on the side of the United States if there is war. In return, Washington would be willing to write off debts incurred for military supplies, grant new loans to the ailing Turkish economy, and put pressure on Europe for Turkey’s admission into the European Union. The Turkish army is therefore preparing to send troops into northern Iraq both to prevent the hundreds of thousands of extremely unfortunate refugees fleeing the bombed Iraqi cities from entering Turkey, and to take control of the region.

Iranian President Mohammed Khatami has reaffirmed, during the proceedings of the seventh summit of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation, held precisely in Istanbul, that his country, a key regional power in the area, ‘is opposed to any unilateral action against Iraq. The UN must play a decisive role (...) the territorial integrity of Iraq and the sovereignty of the Iraqi people must be protected’. Foreign Minister Kamal Kharazi, a few days earlier, stated that Iran ‘will not remain indifferent because there will be a threat to security, stability, and peace in the region, but also in the world. We are strongly opposed to an attack on Iraq and hope that the USA will cooperate with the international community’. In fact, in Tehran, which must reckon with a modern proletariat and a petty bourgeoisie that it keeps at bay with increasing difficulty through the Surahs of the Qur’an and through repression, any destabilisation in the area is unwelcome, be it the fall of Saddam Hussein, the enemy-companion in the past decade-long war, or an overly strong presence of the United States. For its part, Washington has also graciously placed Iran on the list of ‘rogue states’.

The ‘moderate’ Arab states, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, have repeatedly expressed their opposition to a new war that could bring the entire regional order into play; Saudi Arabia above all has to fear a political and economic downsizing of its own.

Naturally, it is a matter of a game among thieves, mainly for the division of the spoils, and it is difficult to predict what the sides will be once the war begins, despite public declarations.

Communists, while not being indifferent to the fronts that are gradually forming, in order to understand which outcome of the clash could be less unfavourable to the proletarian revolution, point out to proletarians that all States are allies in the maintenance of the capitalist order and all are enemies of the proletariat. For proletarians the enemy is in their country: in the future imperialist clash they have no front to choose from but to claim and organise their war, the revolutionary war for the defence of their class interests against the war among imperialist States. This is valid in the U.S.A. and in Europe, but also in Iraq, Iran, etc.

Those who think that the fact that the bourgeois states launch themselves armed against, or in defence of, the ‘rogue states’ is proof and jubilation of power are sorely mistaken. The jubilation is forced, and the display of power historically defensive and obligatory.

There is no unexpected end of history with the definitive establishment of the American Empire, nor even with the disappearance of nation-States into a single empire without borders and without a centre, as some dwarf raves. On the contrary, we are on the eve of processes that Marxism has long awaited. The loud voice of America is an expression of the decline of its hegemony over the world. State mongrels, capitalistically of smaller size, such as Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and others demand their share, aiming for influence in their own regions, and, with clenched teeth, growl around the Yankee mastiff. Washington would like to unify the bourgeois world under its interests, but that world is already unified, in the overflowing of its too glaring and uncontrollable contradictions.

It will be up to the international proletariat to take advantage of those weaknesses and contradictions in order to wage its war on the world bourgeoisie.

When Lenin wrote Imperialism he wrote Capitalism. Only self-styled Marxist-Leninists could think, in their interpretation of Imperialism, or even of ‘Leninism’, as a new phase, that this formula meant to repudiate the premises of nineteenth-century Marxism.

Capitalism, having ended the era, at least in the old industrialised countries, of national settlements, could only culminate in imperialism, with its expressions of colonial oppression and pressure on the metropolitan proletariat, up to the inevitable war between States, which we have always read as social war rather than national.

So when, almost unconsciously paraphrasing our texts, certain bourgeois ideologues in the guise of ‘political scientists’ or ‘war strategists’ admit that terrorist warfare is the latest modality of traditional or conventional warfare, they are merely referring to a type of war ‘with an invisible enemy’ in which the most tormented are the so-called ‘civilians’, even more than the ‘soldiers’ engaged in operations.

If we had the patience to statistically quantify the number of ‘civilian’ victims of the different forms of warfare, from the Napoleonic exploits to today, we could depict this quantity in graphs in which the surge of the last world war would make a great impression. We know very well why this phenomenon manifests itself: because in the capitalist mode of production, war no longer plays the role of simply territorial confrontation between powers, but of an economic and commercial struggle linked to certain levels of development of the productive forces.

The proletarians are called upon not only to ‘produce’ according to the relation that binds them to Capital as a social relation, but to bear the brunt of military action, and thus to suffer those bloodlettings that are necessary for war, understood as the settling of open disputes between the opposing bourgeois gangs in the world.

Thus, for us, war does not simply entail the study of specifically strategic-military questions, which indeed concern us, but above all the complete picture that links production to the war phenomenon, in all its possible implications.

In the imperialist phase, we know how war breaks out as a necessary moment in which contradictions come to a head. If it is true, paraphrasing the overused Clausewitz, that war is the continuation of politics (and economics), it must be said that continuation does not mean the suspension of either production, politics, or diplomacy, but rather the predominance of one dimension over the other, to the point that one – war and the military question – clearly takes precedence over the others and subordinates them to itself due to a series of factors that must be analysed and explained.

Today, in the climate of an almost total lack of influence of the revolutionary current, it has come to be recognised that the military factor can be useful for economic recovery threatened with stagnation, in some way, one affirms ‘let war come’. We certainly do not make it a moral, or worse, moralistic question of indignation at the phenomenon of war, but we will never accept capitalist war as an inevitability to which one must submit, even if the working class, at the general level, is largely enfeebled by national and supranational logics.

To see when, and according to what incidences, war becomes a topic on the agenda, and according to what involvement of States and areas, is not an academic exercise but a necessity.

We have indicated according to which logics the Yalta balances began to crack after decades of cold war during which each bloc sacrificed on the altar of the balances emerging from the Second World War any serious incursion into the others’ area of influence. From Berlin in 1953, to the Hungarian uprising, to the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, to the Polish crisis culminating in 1979, we have observed how, despite the controversies and ‘condemnations’, the so-called West never moved militarily, except in the case of Cuba, when the Monroe Doctrine, enunciated back in 1823, which goes under the formula ‘America for the Americans’, was about to be challenged... Value and endurance of doctrines, right Yankee ‘comrades’? On that occasion, nuclear war was risked, at least so it has been said. But the Soviet bluff showed itself for what it was. One does not throw away an equilibrium emerging from a world slaughter, however precarious, after only a fifteen-year period.

And yet world imperialism, not only US imperialism!, was certainly not standing still. It was after the Vietnam syndrome, as far as the United States is concerned, and after the belt of the USSR’s satellite states went into fibrillation that the Yalta balance began to fail. Beyond all the reverie about Russian aggression, no one can dispute that Russia has not and could not push towards the West, so much so that the defeat in the competition of so-called coexistence, theorised by the ‘bumpkin’ Khrushchev, pushed the empire to implode and declare its end without a shot fired. In short, the Russia Myth had ingloriously revealed itself for what it was, as we had long, and alone against all, predicted.

But we have never considered imperialist dynamics as unchangeable and immobile. We began to foresee, in the years 1975-80, lines of movement, which we defined in the grip of the alternative: either war or revolution. Naturally, amid the laughter of opponents who may have read us. Too simplistic, impractical, schematic, etc.! In reality, no one, we believe, has ever wanted to play the Nostradamus of the situation. Our alternative is not of the moment, but is historical in the imperialist phase. If decades have passed, for some even of ‘disillusionment’, of tired and wearisome ‘waiting’, for us the time of history, long or short, is historical time, manipulable by no one at will, in defiance of any illusion of histoire évenémentielle!

With the opposing military vetoes removed, and with the collapse of the former USSR, it was inevitable that new geopolitical arrangements would have to be drawn up, which were, after all, already in embryo even before the Wall fell.

For us, Russian imperialism for a long time was scheming alongside the more organised and ‘articulated’ Western imperialism; but the regional economic arrangements may well be masked by political superstructures, as was the case for over 60 years. Under that pressure, Stalinist opportunism had, largely, deluded the proletariat that its struggles could find protection under the Russian shield. We have always contested this. And so, when in the past decade 1990-2000 the prevailing US imperialism (and its acolytes) thought to manage the world political apparatus as a sole gendarme, not only were we not surprised, but we knew how to see how the situation would be set in motion, not in anticipation of ‘perpetual peace’, but of new, not entirely predictable world arrangements.

That the USA had ‘humiliated’ the internally fracturing Russia during the war with Iraq, and demonstrated the clear superiority of the instruments of destruction at its disposal; over the decade, the constant attempt to erode Russian influence, even to the point of drawing the former satellite states into its orbit, has led to the current situation, when, by virtue of three Balkan wars and the latest Afghan war, the strategic encirclement is leading to a belt of states stretching from the Caspian Sea to India. The old Russian power finds itself, in its chess game, according to the tactics known to it from Kutuzov to Stalin, playing in reserve, inevitably pretending not wanting to oppose NATO. After all, how could it?

Here then is the common Islamic enemy, which will perhaps allow the old polar bear to get a few chestnuts out of the fire from the powerful former enemy. But the new arrangement is in a process of consolidation, and it needs resources and large deployment of forces.

For this, there is a need for oil, for energy sources (forget about credible alternative sources!) that lie in the Caspian Sea, and which concern the entire area stretching from the Balkans to the Indian Ocean. In this scenario, which was certainly not produced d’amblais, so coincidentally, the special-effects movie-like episode of the terrorist act of 11 September fits into a script that, even if not known in its truly chilling reality, was not unfamiliar to fears long cultivated by the US superpower. Indeed, already very significant episodes, such as those in Kenya, and a previous attack on the towers perpetrated by an American ultra, who was perhaps not thoroughly investigated out of patriotic indulgence, speaks volumes about the ‘terrorist war’ that is being announced for a long, indeed very long, period.

The ‘militarisation’ process of large areas of the globe, in particular the area indicated that stretches from the lower Adriatic and leads to the Indian Ocean, means also territorial control of oil deposits and resources estimated to be of interest to industrialised countries for at least another 20 years.

History plays these tricks: if we broaden the event and link it to others, and seek a logic that connects them to some extent, what seemed ‘singular’ or unrepeatable, instead takes on the contours of a long-term reality, in a certain sense of exemplary continuity. How then can one rant, just because it is fashionable to speak of ‘virtual wars’, as the philosopher Cacciari, a known left-wing federalist, does, claiming that ‘the era of opposing hegemonic wills, of “warring states” has ended’, only to recognise immediately afterwards that ‘no State, by its intrinsic nature, can exercise effective world government’ (Corriere Economia, 12-10-2001).

Certainly, imperialism is not a Superstate, it is not to be identified with a single, albeit devastating, power. It is even worse: it is an inevitable clash of needs and appetites that cannot in any way be masked, even when wearing the mask of victims. If one only calls to mind the war machine perfected over long decades by the imperialist states, one wonders how it was and is possible to delude oneself that the powder keg will not ignite, whether one wants it to or not!

The ‘war’ is defined as an ‘international police operation’, as the opportunist unconscious suggests, lest the centuries-old lesson of two imperialist slaughters and over 169 ‘proxy’ wars, as those that ravaged Africa, Asia, and Latin America for decades were called, be borne in mind. It is the temporary substitute for the ‘protracted war’. Certainly, ‘international policing’ alludes to ‘security’ measures against the ‘invisible enemy’, protected by the ‘rogue states’ that, at the opportune moment, declared themselves surprised by the misdeeds of the fundamentalists. The bearded priests of Kabul, from the apparently poorest country, populated by tribes harassed by a host of fanatics already raised and used by the same technological imperialism for its own ends, are no exception. See the map marking the real and planned passage of the oil pipelines, and you will understand something!

We know something about the trickery and ambiguity of words: if we wanted to be subtle, every phase of the war between opposing fractions of Capital has been fitted with a special name. After the undisciplined belle époque of the early twentieth century, the ‘Great War’, a majestic name that commanded respect and terror; then the ‘Democratic War’ against ‘Nazi-Fascist Barbarism’, a noble war par excellence, whose task was to eradicate the ‘raving madman possessed by the devil’ (a recent definition by the expert Ratzinger); then the ‘Cold War’, naturally served iced over to the most unfortunate, left in the hands of their own bloc of alignment. Then the 1990-2000 interregnum, marked by the worst war, called ‘Humanitarian’, which, in the name of the new world order, saw to it that America became the ‘Sole Gendarme’, which, in the name of the ‘Pensée Unique’, should have marked the end of every war waged, inaugurating ‘Globalisation’, the reign of the market, of a new belle époque danced to the rhythm of rock and of the unbridled society of consumption, of sex, and of cheap meat, raw and cooked... It was short-lived, and, as then, awakened to reality in a dark and threatening way. But in all these names there was and is present the seed that has given it life: imperialist capitalism.

There are those who, inevitably, put it down to ‘metaphysics’, with the usual consideration that ‘war’ has always been, and will always be; unless there is an ‘inner revolution’ of Man!

Since it is urgent to adhere to a circumscribed, concrete analysis of the concrete situation, it is a question of establishing to what extent it is the case to dilate the time and space to be taken into consideration: we have said it since our very beginning: the twentieth century, once the wars for the settlement of national borders have ended, at least in Europe, is the long century (anything but short à la Hobsbawm) of anti-proletarian wars whose end is not in sight, even once it is over.

The more than serious objection that by now Europe is not the world, and that we ourselves should go back to our text Factors of Race and Nation, is certainly not to be underestimated. Certainly, we cannot fall into the ethno-racial formula according to which Europe has always sinned of ‘Eurocentrism’, failing to fully appreciate the contribution and specificity of other geographical and cultural areas.

Marx himself has often been accused of German racism, for having privileged the modern dialectic born in this country with Hegel, for not having had good consideration for Asian culture, etc. We should better say, precisely to those who in the name of relativism cannot understand ‘relativity’ not only as applied to the physical and natural world, but also to the historical and social world, that it is useless to pretend not to see that in the epoch of industrialisation, the culture of the old continent had predominance, radiated influence and economic and cultural power! What are we supposed to do: pretend not to see, and perhaps not understand why Marx speaks of combining English political economy with French politics and German philosophy? At least he proved himself (may he not turn in his grave!) European long before those gentleman.

But this is not the issue. It is instead that the development of the productive forces, radiating from the favoured, even by climate, Anglo-Saxon civilisation, has shaped the entire world in its own image. We do not lament it, it would be time wasted, and perhaps unjustly so.

The much-cited and overused Huntington (The Clash of the Civilisations), who moves on the wave of ‘superstructures’, like all those who want to conceal the much-hated economism (which we ourselves consider insufficient and misleading), nevertheless attempts to decipher the tensions of the new millennium. There is no question that the primacy of technology produced by the West compels certain cultures already prominent in the past to reckon with the pre-eminent imperialism of the Anglo-Saxon area, whether those of the Middle Eastern area (which includes both transplanted Judaism and Islam), or those of the Indian Hindu area, or Confucianism disguised as ‘communism’, or Japanese Shintoism. But if, in the name of the diversified cultural areas, we were no longer to see the economic and social substructure, then indeed we would have sold out the theory and every key to interpreting the current war crisis!

We should instead seriously ask ourselves the reason for the poorly disguised operation, which tends to see in certain cultures, sick with integrism, as the cause of the conflict. We have always maintained that when Capital has clothed itself in the odious features of extreme nationalism, from fascism to Nazism, and today in religiously motivated terrorism, it had and has to disguise irreconcilable interests, which only through war can, if not be wiped out, at least even out their historically accumulated dispute.

Who does not see that the Islamic nations, very diverse and varied in their development, have deluded themselves into living off ‘oil rent’ for a long time, ever since the 1973 crisis, when the ‘petrodollar’ seemed to have brought the Western economy and especially the US economy to its knees. Yet, in spite of the fact that Saudi Arabia is still ruled by the ‘Wahabis’ (doctrinally the most integrist and conservative core of Islam), there has been an alignment of this country, the top oil producer, with the US superpower. How is this explained, according to Islamic ‘fundamentalism’? Let us not fall into the trap: Islam, apparently impervious to Capital understood in the Anglo-Saxon sense, will fall, just as the most backward Christianity has already done, under the pressure not of neutral ‘Technology’ (see Severino) but of murderous Capital! Not that, in our eyes, this power is an insuperable and demonic given, but because the superiority of modern productive forces, as it defeated feudalism, so will it defeat the ummah.

It will only be overthrown by the coalition of extorted labour, by the proletarians of the whole world united. But where are they? Wonders the infidel. Don’t you see how subservient they are, there to Allah, here to the factory, to the now increasingly anonymous master? Do not despair. In the twists and turns that history knows how to create, that determine themselves, not through the motive force of mutual love, but through social necessity (which will also create real empathy, rather than miserable and squalid competition for crumbs), that coalition will be reborn from its ashes, like the Arabian phoenix.

No one seems to ‘believe in it’. And judging by the facts, the ‘shitty facts’, it seems to be right. But we abide by the verdict of history. Even at the end of the nineteenth century, the most skilful of sophists had boasted of having forced Marxism into the ‘attic’, only to find it alive and well 15 years later, and in what a way!

Armed with this conviction, with these indisputable facts, we must also concern ourselves with imperialism, with its strategic and military arrangements. Marx and Engels’ serious and systematic study of the historical conditions of their time, of the real and possible alignments, was not intended to be academic; nor did they delude themselves into thinking it could tamper with them at will. But in the epoch of the ‘double revolution’ possible in certain areas, it entailed inevitable and necessary alliances, since the alignment of the proletariat in temporary support of the progressive bourgeoisies was vital.

And today? It is not enough to say that now, in the supreme phase of capitalism, these problems do not arise at all. Certainly not in metropolitan areas. But in backward areas, where problems of tribalism, of cynical use of the oppositions between ‘ruling groups’ corrupted with other vague or impotent ones, are debated, it is not certain. Concrete analysis of the concrete situation is still useful and necessary. The Party will have to take charge of this. And in fact, within the limits of its means, it has done so. We refer to the works on South Africa, Ethiopia, and the very elaborate works on China. Certainly, today’s globalised world is not that of nineteenth-century Europe, and paradoxically, just to understand it would require a Party force 10 times more powerful than that of the time. But it is also true that in doctrine the fundamental problem is the compass, the ability to orient oneself. And above all the force, which has been historically decimated by betrayal!

Concluding quickly on our topic, by contrast, we have the ‘good fortune’ to witness internal cracks in imperialism that will never make us say phrases like ‘paper tiger’, or the usual drivel of a Negri, in his latest ‘Empire’ (not by chance published by Harvard: as they say, American academia!) which claims that ‘globalisation in itself is not a bad thing because it has finally swept away the nation states’!

Imperialism knows that it is going through a difficult epoch. Were it for military means, it would have to field destructive forces, but, at its own expense, it is learning that ‘destruction’ should be ‘creative’, and not simply ‘destructive’! We know of the naivety of an Einstein who, supreme in physics, was naive in politics to the point of saying ‘World War IV will be fought with stones’! Materialist dialectics does not reduce everything to force: it knows the value of politics, because it is well aware of the nature of the economy that underpins it, the interests that animate it. But ultimately it knows that the economy is a long-term product, of modes of production of forms that, in order to mould themselves, have metabolised men and things!

Thus, we know that imperialist war, beyond the names we may give it for convenience, is the fruit of antagonistic ways of producing and thinking. Certainly, neither the USA nor the other contenders will leave the field to socialism without tears and blood. But they will have to yield to the power of the productive forces they have evoked.

It is up to us not to lose sight of the real, actual conditions, neither by inflating them with illusion, nor by underestimating their cracks.

In recent times certain ‘strategists’, worldwide, have pointed out that in particular areas of the planet, the exclusive use of violence, which by ‘social contract’ should be the State’s, is in the hands of poorly identified groups, from mafias and highly organised criminal circles to terrorists connected to each other, even if according to clauses and ways to be better understood. The matter is all the more important, since Lenin, in State and Revolution recognises the ‘sovereign capitalist States’ to be the ‘business committees’ of the bourgeoisie.

This does not mean that the States of the world, yesterday and today, have been able to realise the effective reservation of the use of force. This is attributable to that anarchy proper to the capitalist mode of production, which does not limit itself to production relations, to competition only in fine ‘fair’ intentions, but also invades the terrain of so-called ‘sovereignty’. This observation serves to emphasise that the alleged ‘order’ is incompatible with the anarchy of the market and of the relations between the opposing fractions of Capital.

When certain States have introduced ‘dictatorship’, as in the case of fascism and Nazism, not to mention the Stalinist degeneration in Russia, they have not thereby been able to effectively bring order to their domain, for the simple reason that order without justice is ‘thievery’ (Augustine docet!, without disturbing our doctrine which has always affirmed this).

So, needing to understand well what the powers are, the forces at the command of imperialist States today, we must understand how much and to what extent the bourgeoisie of the various countries relies on its centralised ‘business committee’ within the respective nation-States, and when it instead colludes with irregular groups, so as to be more efficient or more favoured, if necessary. All scholars have had to emphasise that, at their origin, authoritarian, indeed ‘totalitarian’, States had their path paved by ‘bands of irregulars’ dissatisfied with the inefficiency of the existing state apparatus. Think of the ‘fasci di combattimento’ of 1919 in Italy, of the nascent National Socialism that in the course of its development saw bloody settling of scores, such as the elimination of Röhm’s S.A. by Himmler’s emerging S.S. In short, the ‘irregulars’, in our view, were not the ‘anti-State’, as the democrats have on several occasions complained (moreover, they are today, and increasingly, proponents of the ‘continuity of the State!’). But, on the contrary, they represented the supporting forces of the permanent ‘business committee’ of Capital.

Therefore the great current campaign against international terrorism should be read as the continuation of a function: imperialism, in its inextinguishable internal tendency to engulf the proletariat, where the latter does not decide to reorganise itself on a general scale, needs to indicate targets, to choose enemies. This is on an ideological level: on a practical level, irregular armies in every part of the world are the thermometer of the deep unease in which the nation-States come to find themselves, pressed by new exigencies, in the constant need to keep tension high.

Naturally, the phenomenon is as anti-proletarian as ever, since it prevents disciplined organisation, economic defence, and the possibility of allowing the class party adequate influence. As was already experienced during the so-called years of lead in Italy (but also in countries interested in the phenomenon for other reasons, such as Spain, Northern Ireland, and the Middle Eastern environment of the Palestinian and Israeli conflict), when the irregulars have started shooting, the working class has been besieged by regular deployments, which have thus been able to tighten their grip on any attempt at effective class reorganisation. In our interpretation, therefore, terrorism on both a national and transnational scale is by no means foreign to the logic of nation-States or of supranational apparatuses in the making. Without claiming to know their confused strategies in detail, we know from centuries of experience that they are always inevitably anti-proletarian. The nascent historiography on their function can no longer deny how they have been used by ‘legal’ deployments, according to the so-called tactic of ‘rogue secret services’ caught countless times ‘sidetracking’, directing, polluting, suggesting... In short, even within the ‘legal’ and ‘legitimate’ apparatus of the official State, the boundary between ‘legality’ and ‘illegality’ is an ever-open problem.

If then it is true, as certain strategists claim, that forces as complex as never before collaborate, intertwine, to the point of having given rise to extra-state military apparatuses, one wonders what the overall state of the military forces in the field is in the current imperialist reality. If we want to talk about it, not for polemical but ‘cognitive’ reasons, as is necessary if one wishes to portray one or more credible scenarios, then it is necessary to skim off the epiphenomena of official propaganda whose function is to influence, to keep so-called public opinion in check. The same people in the bourgeois milieu, when talking to each other, are forced to set aside the drum-beating, and recognise the balance of power.

The democratic cover-up cannot deny that, especially at crucial moments, decisions must be ‘secret’, legal guarantees ‘suspended’ for the most part; it is all very well to say that in ‘democracy’ there will in due time be control of the vote. But in the meantime, according to recent historiographical publications, we learn that the democrat Roosevelt, although aware of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, acted in such a way as to force American isolationism to come out of its shell. One wonders: what if, as happened to the ‘duce’, he had lost the game?

According to our critique, the substance of the military apparatuses represents the hard core that makes its weight felt at the right moment. The imperialist State, whether it presents itself under the democratic guise or under the ‘authoritarian’ one, remains a ‘State’. This is recognised precisely in these times, when the liberal spirit has claimed to demolish or downgrade the function of the State, right up to the theorisations of ‘anarcho-capitalism’ in the USA. It makes a certain impression, out of the blue, immediately after the attack on the two towers, to hear a liberal so self-assured as the political scientist Panebianco, titular editor for Corriere della Sera ‘The Return of the State, in War and in Peace’, admit that this entity, considered outdated, sidelined by the global market, is returning to centre stage.

This comes as no surprise to us, who have never neglected to maintain that the bourgeois State and its modern ramifications into supranational bodies are the political theme that has always been central. Is the intoxication of ‘globalisation’, without ever mentioning its real name, imperialism, coming to an end? ‘Both “anti” and “pro” globalisation politics now seemed on the verge of “de-territorialising” (another magic word!), of reorganising themselves in forms such as to bypass States, accelerating their obsolescence (...) then 11 September came along, a war certainly “sui generis” broke out, which however is not illegitimate, I believe, to define as a “third world war”. And everything that seemed to be established is called into question. It is no longer certain that globalisation will continue, or, at least, that it will continue at the tumultuous pace of the last decade’. Fortunately he too did not use the term ‘end of the belle époque’... but in short, the recognition that ‘World War III is underway’ has come out. We know very well how much has been and will be argued over the question of the ‘beginning’ of wars. For us, who have always maintained that in the last analysis the capitalist war against the proletariat is ‘permanent’, to hear certain things, certain acknowledgments is of a certain interest.

This is followed by ‘comparative’ considerations with other calamities of the past: ‘The outbreak of the First World War brought an end to the globalisation of markets that had affected the Western world in the preceding fifty years. Only at the end of the 1970s, for example, did commercial exchange return to the level it had reached in 1914. Today, the intensification of controls on the movement of men and things is due to the need to prevent new attacks, the new state controls (presumably destined to become ever more pervasive) on banking movements in order to strike at “terrorist finance”, the more than probable contractions of certain personal freedoms in the face of the demands of the fight against terrorist networks deployed in Western countries...’. When we argued, without deviating by a comma, that liberalism and protectionism are two sides of the same coin, we were mistaken for inveterate ‘statists’, advocates of centralisation in an era where everyone has converted to federalist traps or similar models. It should now be explained to us what the connection will be between federalist perspectives and military necessities that exhume and exalt the function of the central State, or rather, of military, logistical, and strategic interstate programmes.

The explanation is this: ‘If globalisation retreats or stagnates, then the State returns to carry out a leading political role. The cause of this “is precisely war”. Fifty-odd years of peace (?) have made many in Europe believe that the State is, essentially, a provider of services, be it pensions, schools, or internal security. It is not so. The State, in its true essence, is a war machine. The State is born, on the ashes of feudal anarchy, from war. And it is war that makes it become, over the centuries, a great bureaucratic organisation. In Europe, the land of its birth, the State routs, in a long, armed, Darwinian-style competition, every other kind of political organisation, precisely because it proves to be the “most efficient war machine”’.

All of sudden, therefore, the nature, the essence of the State is rediscovered. Indeed, with the image of the ‘war machine’, which is not alien to us, one ends up exaggerating; but not even a reference, for now, to classes. A bit like Dühring, suddenly everything is brought into being by violence. It is war that gives rise to the State, it is violence that raises it and makes it grow. This is partly true: but we are not so drastic and one-sided. The ‘business committee of the bourgeoisie’ does not, in our school, perform an exclusive military function, even if this is central and ineradicable. The State manages all the affairs of Capital, which has one reason: that of maximising profit. If, to achieve this goal, under certain conditions, protectionism is more effective and functional than ‘free trade’, it will have no problem determining the conditions that favour it. The ‘business committee’ has this end to pursue, so that today, after the attack on the towers, it turns out that the State is first and foremost a ‘war machine’ means little; but if this already known ‘war machine’, in a climate of ‘economic recession’ (begun before the attack on the towers), requires the suspension of personal freedoms or their limitation, and the end of unbridled ‘free trade’, then nothing can stand in its way.

This explains why the novice Bush has quickly learned his lesson: the war will have to be long... for years! To defeat the invisible enemy? As long as it yields profit to the Capital of which it is principal business commissioner! And the American industrialists (and the world’s, who immediately pledged their total cooperation!) are well aware of this. The fact is that constitutionally, emotions, even strong and sincere ones, last for a short time, according to their nature; whereas the ‘reason of Capital’, as a historical force, endure and transcend not only moments, but years, decades, centuries!

Military strategy, then, is not to be confused with ‘logistics’, because its overall ‘logic’ is something more complex and serious. For this reason – and we have always said so – war is not a ‘military’ question or to be entrusted to the military, but it is a political question that reflects economic determinations, and it can only be entrusted to the logic of class, whether or not the actors on stage at a given historical juncture know it.

Indeed, after the excitement of the moment, it is bluntly acknowledged that the current scenario of the ‘terrorist war’ has long been prepared by the manoeuvres of Capital linked to oil reserves, to the ambiguous policy of Saudi Arabia, to the reserves of the USA which must decide whether to get their hands on the deposits of Alaska, of Mexico, or to continue to rely on the major producer, at the more favourable prices in the Middle Eastern market in general.

Inevitably, when war ‘breaks out’, all attention tends to be captured by ‘military operations’, and there is no one who does not in some way pose as a ‘strategist’: this is what is happening once again before our eyes.

The usual tug-of-war between the ‘military’ of the academies, who press to have a free hand, and set up their technological war, possibly always in the name of the surgical strike, or the decisive blitzkrieg, and the other apparatuses of the State, according to the roleplay between diplomacy and economy.

In the case of the ‘terrorist’ war, some have pointed out how the insidious and invisible enemy can only be defeated through a targeted and covert ‘intelligence’ campaign. But are we sure that this is really and completely the case? If the number of enemies, between direct and potential enemies, reaches the handsome figure of 60 states, one wonders how it can end in the short term and according to plans guided by rationality.

Our thesis is quite different: it has long been the case that Capital in its imperialist phase, with profit rates on an inevitable downward trend, can no longer content itself with regional skirmishes, however strategically important: it needs to clean up the environment in order to create conditions of destruction capable of restoring high profit rates, which only a very hard and long war can guarantee. Secondly, since the casus belli this time is resounding, it is a matter of not missing the opportunity to whip friends and foes alike, lukewarm and uncertain. The coalition that is emerging is as varied as ever. The former USSR, after a decade of internal anarchy, needs to reorganise itself; if the USA is ready to pull some chestnuts out of the fire for it, it will be well supported. China, defined with its ‘capitalist communism!’, as a great power that should occupy the stage in an increasingly evident way (it is said with worrying consequences, but only from 2015!) has every interest in giving the impression of moderation and balance.

Therefore, certain ‘giants’ in the field should not be taken literally, sticking to official statements. What is interesting and should be emphasised is, in any case, that the function of the State, once again, is irreplaceable, even if the war is defined as anomalous, anti-terrorist. ‘The armed intervention against the Afghanistan of the Taliban shows that even the “enemy” is forced to “re-territorialise”, to make itself, in spite of itself, a State’.

Therefore even the utopia, or the accusation that is levelled at Bin Laden’s Islamic fundamentalist movement, of being a force without a territorial base, extremist and nihilist, is without a valid foundation. In reality, just as terrorism on the national scale tended to make itself a ‘State’, so terrorism on the international scale tends to leverage certain state complexes. Just as we uphold the thesis that the bourgeois idea of a super-state world community that administers capital fairly is utopian and misleading, whether it be called the ‘new world order’ or any other acronym, so we remain convinced that communism’s seizure of power will not be generically ‘international’, because the conquest of the State will have to be realised in certain geopolitical spheres, which do not exclude the current ‘national’ States. In short, all the fuss that has been made about the ‘post-state’, ‘transnational’ epoch is destined to come to terms with the reality of States, which are alive and well and whose function is twofold: the classic one of internal repression and aggression-defence in relation to foreign States. Indeed, the same author recognises that ‘the theory of state sovereignty distinguishes between external and internal sovereignty (...) But external and internal sovereignty are connected. A recovery of external sovereignty as a result of war corresponds to a resurgence of the role of internal sovereignty, in the sense of greater weight of the State’. It is easy to understand in what sense: war carried outward results in pressure on the subaltern classes internally, in fear of defeatism and attack on the State itself engaged against the ‘enemy’.

What we must emphasise is that leaps forward are not allowed: hence why we have never renounced our own specific ‘theory of the State’. We are certainly not on Panebianco’s terrain, but his admission that the State, ‘as a result of war’, is resuming its obvious function, after slogans such as ‘less State, more market’, makes a certain impression. It is only to be imagined, in the circumstances that are now looming, how those who, faced with the restrictions on ‘personal freedom’, indefinite preventive detention, as proposed by Justice Minister Ashcroft, will protest in the name of the Rule of Law. We have always known what the ‘Rule of Law’ consists of for the proletariat: work, pay attention to the rules, take in just enough air to refresh labour power.

And from the military point of view? For now, in the name of war against the invisible enemy, ‘highly professional units’ will be used... But will this be enough? It is no coincidence that in recent decades almost everyone, on the right and on the left, has spoken out in favour of the ‘new model army’, thus renouncing the conscript army in the traditional sense. One will object: how can you now cry out against mandatory conscription that mows down workers and peasants, proletarians in general? The war is waged by ‘specialists’, with risks inversely proportional to the professionalism achieved. And in fact it is the so-called ‘civilians’ who pay... as if the matter were more appealing and less grave. To the point that, faced with the execrations raised against these massacres, some became indignant in claiming that ‘soldier or civilian, all are on the same level before the duty of war!’ At least Frederick II reserved the exclusive function of war for the army! The absolutely incontrovertible fact is that war has evolved according to the needs of a mode of production that has made permanent mobilisation, the competition of more soldiers, its favourite secret for obtaining the desired results.

Once again, as we can see, the alternative will be clear: not simply against war, because it is always dirty and evil, but, as we have always said: War on war for revolutionary war. Otherwise, proletarians and the more exposed middle classes will pay the usual toll, which we do not yet know how high it will be.

But since the experts in ‘polemology’, not least the ‘emeritus’ Sartori, are disputing whether it can officially be said that World War III has broken out or not, it is useful to remember that the ‘war’ event in the strict sense is taking on, in the rotten phase of imperialism, peculiar tempos and modes. We have certainly been the only ones to argue that the 160-odd proxy wars, in the midst of the ‘cold’ war, have been a veritable massacre of the world’s ‘last’, crushed and forgotten, causing, especially in the last decade, true genocides. For the bourgeoisie and opportunism still in cahoots, they were unpleasant episodes that could disturb the ‘peace’, even if on the constant brink of the atomic threat.

Some have even boasted that never had there been more than 50 years of increasing development; contradicted by us in the name of the thesis, which we continue to maintain, of the increasing (relative) misery of the proletariat as a class on a world scale! Blasphemy, of course, for those who measured fetidly on the scale of the most industrialised states, speaking of second and third worlds, vomitous formulas that have given the metropolitan working class the illusion of being part of the ‘lucky ones’!

So, beyond the ‘outbreak’, the third world war has been fought and is being fought for a long time. Just as the nib of the seismograph goes crazy in the measure of the rate of profit, so, albeit not mechanically, Capital has had to balance ‘war’ and peace, illusions of perpetual peace with repeated crises, capable of blowing everything to smithereens, from the distant, by now, 1962 (Cuban Crisis), to the invasions of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and, almost, Poland, up to Vietnam, Afghanistan, which marked the implosion of Russia, to Iraq. But since all knots come sooner or later to the comb, it would have been too much for Capital to be able to continue cheating; now it makes it clear that ‘the war will be long, it will be painful’, and the choruses of imperialism do nothing but claim that 11 September has changed everyone’s life.

The life of the working class must, on the other hand, truly change.

In our analysis, imperialist capitalism thrives on war, not only when it decides to unleash it, but even before, when it prepares for it with its frenzied thirst and pursuit of profit, at the stage when everything seems to be going swimmingly.

As for the First World War, in the first decades of the 20th century the bourgeoisie enjoyed it by celebrating what was called the ‘belle époque’; only those who paid the high price for that preparation, the proletariat, were able to foresee it. So when the war ‘broke out’ (never was a term so appropriate, to the point that it is still used today) in the apparent general surprise, there were those who were only confirmed in their assessments. Indeed, as we know, what Friedrich Engels had predicted many years earlier, in the late 1800s, with analyses and studies, was confirmed. If anything, it came late, not in the sense that it was hoped for.

Moreover, it arrived ‘early’ in the sense that it found a proletariat inadequately organised and ‘prepared’. Yes because while capital inevitably ‘prepares’, with its mode of production, the war, the workers’ movement ‘prepares’ the revolution. Not the undifferentiated proletariat, but its conscious vanguards, linked and organised in its parties and economic defence unions.

The molecular processes that push the antagonistic classes to clash are not visible and recognisable to everyone. If this were the case, one would not speak of the ‘outbreak’ of war, or of revolution, but of a foregone, normal event, almost like a natural fact. And instead it is necessary, for events not to find the proletariat unprepared and exposed in the face of the bourgeois attack, disguised as a war between States, that the proletarian organisation be guided by its political Party, or as in that case, by its parties.

The State-Revolution-War nexus is truly complex, and cannot be understood without a dialectical evaluation. It is not automatic that war, even that one, taken to the extreme of its forms, defined as ‘anti-terrorist’, determines the conditions favourable to revolutionary recovery. Lenin in hand, at least three conditions must be present for the process to be triggered: 1) that conditions exist for a crisis of bourgeois relations; 2) that the crisis finds a workers’ movement on the whole healthy; 3) that the war produces a refusal by the proletariat to follow its bourgeoisie onto the battlefield.

If Engels in 1890, despite the organisational power of the ‘social democracy’, both politically and in terms of economic defence, already wished for ‘more time’ in order to strengthen the proletariat so that it could oppose the bourgeoisie with arms, we have to say that, after the failures of the 20th century, the current state of health of the proletarian movement is very bad. It would be an expedient to attribute all ills to the Stalinist counter-revolution and its outcomes and tails, but one probably fails to fully appreciate the damage caused by the defeat suffered and inflicted on the very heart of the movement.

We are thus in the condition, to realistically admit, that today there do not exist either economic and class-defence organisations, nor even the slightest and measurable influence of the class party. Conditions that we could describe as, if not desperate, such as to cause discouragement. But it is also true that we have never accepted working from pessimism. The conditions of proletarian labour will push certain vanguards to return to the path of organisation and struggle.

We have already observed how the nature of war defined as ‘terrorist’ tends, even more than in the past, to suspect of ‘coexistence’ anyone who does not align or condemn. The level of class consciousness is so disturbed and disordered that it is not enough that the party tell them ‘the right things’ and point out the correct tactics. Material conditions will have to play their part. Fortunately, we are determinists!

Increasingly, one hears the argument that a military tactic informed by the concept of ‘preventive war’ is necessary on the part of bourgeois States, that is, attacking in order to defend oneself, breaking the deadlock so as to surprise the adversary. By placing war in a broader and wider context than the response to the casus belli, there is no longer any way to distinguish war from the ‘just reprisal’.

If one only looks at instances in the past that would have been sufficient to trigger a general conflict, one must admit that the Third World War has broken out already more than once. The question is justified by the fact that military strategists increasingly argue for the simultaneity of ‘war’ and ‘peace’: while weapons move, at the same time Capital intensifies the rhythms of production, precisely in the name of the needs determined by the conflict. War, waged by several sides and according to distinct logics, means, as it has always happened, but particularly during the Second World War, that while diplomacy agrees on divisions and designs new arrangements of power, including territorial ones, weapons open new fronts, the economy marks new surges, shaping, with its plasticity, new productive rhythms.

This does not detract from the fact that the war-event in the strict sense can still be signalled as ‘particular’, or in any case as breaking previous balances. This is why the propaganda machine is at work to convince that after 11 September the world is no longer what it was before: it is a matter of persuading that the break is over, and an epoch ‘of tears, sweat, and blood’ has once again begun. While it is true that in the ancient and classical concept and practice of war, peace is but an interval within the overall framework of polemos that governs the world, it cannot be denied that Western culture is the mother of all battles. In a certain way, it is the vulgar translation of the seemingly painless philosophical formula of the primacy of ‘becoming’, of constant change as the essence of the world.

But once we have entered into the imperialist phase of capital, it is no longer possible to justify ourselves behind fine theoretical formulas: the proletariat, under these conditions, would be engulfed by the ‘fatal necessity of the movement’. Therefore, in our tradition and version of war, as likewise of ‘revolution’, the term ‘permanent’ does not seem to us the most pertinent. Both war and peace constitute ‘rhythms’ to be recognised and not underestimated.

Dialectics, after all, alludes to the ‘rhythms’ of reality. Sticking to the pole of Being or Becoming, in the abstract, means nothing to us. Not by chance does Plato, considered a parricide, in relation to Parmenides, first recognises ‘rhythm’ as rupture of the immobility of Being. In sum, war, even when we were to maintain that under the capitalist regime, never ceases, since the extortion of surplus value in the factory and in the fields is nonetheless ‘class war’, is a process to be recognised, with its peculiarities of an organisational, administrative order, that interrupts and violently calls into question the ‘normal’ rhythm of productive life.

When we speak of ‘world war’, we mean a process from which not all the countries of the organised world are in fact saved, more or less indirectly. If throughout the period of the ‘cold war’ the phenomenon of war affected circumscribed areas, first Korea, then Vietnam, then Iraq, and so on, it is correct on our part to argue that Capital had believed it possible to postpone world war in the proper sense, managing to mend rifts, contradictions, internal necessities of various kinds. That is why, when after the 1973 oil crisis, and particularly after 1975, we went back to talking about the two alternative possibilities, ‘either war or revolution’, we pointed out the basic contradiction that Capital could not have evaded since then. Of course we always hoped that an organised and growing proletarian movement could ‘anticipate’ Capital’s designs. Have we, as always, sinned of ‘incurable optimism’? In our texts it is written that it is good to sin of ‘generosity’ rather than of pessimism or fatalism.

This does not mean that objective material conditions can be forced beyond a certain limit: and so we have witnessed other decades, the 80s and 90s, during which there were those who deluded themselves about the thousand lives of Capital: it was the time of reckless stock market games, which made many feel a bit like ‘yuppies’, financiers on the loose. But tensions, for those who could see them, were not lacking in various parts of the globe. These were the decades of the swan-song of the ‘Russia myth’, which left millions of proletarians orphaned, still deluded by the ‘miracle’. The old arrangements, including territorial ones, were about to fall: the Yalta accords (and we have been pointing this out for a long time) were falling apart, until the illusion of the ‘new world order’ gave the impression that the USA could play the role of ‘gendarme’ and locomotive at the same time, forever.

It could not last: and indeed deep tensions are manifesting themselves in crucial areas, which have always been the thermometer and epicentre of political and social earthquakes. We refer to the three Balkan wars, which have been witnessed without the proletariat being able to lift a finger, in solidarity not purely nominal towards brothers massacred in the name of ‘ethnic and racial hatreds’, but in reality as always sacrificed in the arrangement of strategic areas leading from the Adriatic to the Caspian, where gas and oil deposits of exceptional importance have been identified.

One writer, among many intellectuals, in these days, has wanted to play the clever, or perhaps the inspired, claiming that it makes him laugh to think that someone still attributes the cause of all evils and tensions to oil (Vassalli in Corriere della Sera) because now it is a matter of taking note that everything is produced by hatred between men... Fundamentalist Islamists would be sworn enemies of the West, and they would not give a damn about oil resources, but about the victory of Allah against the infidels...

Never as much as in this phase has one insisted on explaining the war with reference to Allah, to the Christian God, to the God of the Jews. Then, using our method of investigation, one finds that even the philosopher Cacciari, with a beard to match, admits that it would be worth understanding things better, perhaps with the old ‘Marxist’ method... Well, look who decided to show up again! Naturally, let there be no illusions that one is citing Marx in order to draw some generic... ‘revolutionary’ solution! Oh no! Nowadays, for the most cultured and refined, citing Marx is a matter of being ‘off’, that is, of demonstrating one’s own ‘independence of judgement’.

And so, the question inevitably arises: where does the ‘revolution’ stand? As the profit rate falls and the economic system confirms all the Party’s theses, why doesn’t the proletariat move? Can we move it with slogans, with watchwords? Aside from the fact that ‘statistically’, we are told, the classical Fordist factory proletariat has been largely replaced by cellular labour, decentralised labour, etc., etc., one would like to gloss over how the entire state apparatus of the metropolitan countries, while persistently trimming the ‘welfare State’, does not have the courage to do so outright.

Materialistically, in short, the proletariat in metropolitan countries, despite the crisis, still has ‘something to lose’. In Marx’s classical version it has ‘nothing to lose but its chains’, but at the ‘general class’ scale taken in its political notion that only the party has. In contingent terms, i.e. given the proletariat as it finds itself moving today, national fraction by national fraction, at certain moments tribalised by the nationalist uproar, it is evident why it proves deaf to any impulse of solidarity with its brothers and sisters in less favoured contexts, lured by the crumbs that still fall, after all, from the imperialist banquet. Here, the theme, this truly permanent one, is this, the lesson that must never be set aside is this: in even the slightest activity of economic defence, one must always make sure that the demands are in line with the consolidation of proletarian forces. But the proletariat, which knows the shame of competition within itself, will not adhere to forms of solidarity because they are ‘good’ or sensitive in a moralistic sense. Once again, it must be the real conditions, the social determinations that push it towards the exercise of sharing demands against Capital, not to yield to its unchallenged domination.

The unleashing, by the bourgeoisie, of all its resources, material, ideological, religious, even ‘artistic’, is plain for all to see. The justification of the necessity of war, in preparation for delivering the ‘decisive blow’, carefully avoids invoking long-term hatreds, which are indeed ‘religious in a broad sense’; indeed, all reassurances go in this direction: ‘no holy war, but a just reprisal against evil’. How can one fail to realise that this ‘Manichaean’ way of waging war cannot stand the test of time? But in the age of ‘global communication’, one should not be surprised. Messages are addressed to anonymous ‘masses’, reduced, from a ‘cultural’ point of view, to objects to be manipulated. Those who interpret the issue according to cultural yardsticks, projecting their own notion of things, must take into account that ‘mass culture’, by widespread admission, has never reached such low levels as today. Of course, the Class Party does not adapt to this reality, but it knows how to read the messages of the bourgeoisie. When the time comes, even the pacifists, the Churches, ambiguous and uncertain between ‘legitimate defence’ and peace at all costs, will choose their side.

We by no means rule out the possibility that the imperialist bourgeoisie might once again don the same brazenness as Nazism and also move in the name of the superiority of one ‘race’ against another of the species. But we know very well that the art of democratic sales talk is far more refined, and dangerous, than those of, albeit powerful, Goebbels-style propaganda. We matters to us is knowing how to see beneath and behind these smokescreens, and what some admit half-heartedly must be said without mincing words: Capital cannot allow itself to be overwhelmed by stagnation; its ‘animal spirits’, however cleverly concealed, will have to come out into the open.

And indeed, Minister Rumsfeld has already warned on two occasions about the possibility of the use of ‘tactical’ atomic bombs, making it clear that ‘extreme weaponry’ may also be deployed. If we take into account our ‘military question’, which, to simplify momentarily, centres on the need to turn war between States into class war, the question that arises in these catastrophic times is this: but what weapons will the proletariat be able to use? Notoriously, while for certain petty-bourgeois movements, for extremist left-wing revolutionism, the problem of developing a military arsenal has always been posed independently from the political programme, according to a disjointedness that is not only doctrinaire but particularly ‘practical’, in our tradition the military question cannot be detached from determined historical conditions.

The most obvious and paradigmatic lesson was the Russian experience: the Bolsheviks, who had a powerful influence among the soldiers’ soviets, were at the forefront in overthrowing the army’s weapons in the name of revolutionary war.

This problem could be posed: because in the present war the bourgeoisie has taken its measures, training professional corps and sidelining mandatory conscription, about which it became suspicious not only during the First War but also in the Second (despite everything, for instance in Italy, in 1943, with the fall of fascism, and after 8 September, the army remained at the mercy of organisational and practical disorder). It will certainly be more difficult for the ‘mercenaries’ to turn their weapons against their own bourgeoisie. The proletarians, rather than at the front, at least in tactical expectations, will be in factories and workplaces.

Will the reaction to the war occur, and must it occur in so-called ‘civil society’? If we retrace, even briefly, the proletarian stance within the army, this problem is not to be underestimated, not simply for ‘technical’ reasons, but for ‘political’ reasons. The use of weapons in ‘traditional’ warfare is not the same as that employed in ‘professional’ warfare.

The main weapon, even if not decisive, of the proletariat remains, classically, the molecular struggle of resistance against the pressure of Capital, which does not seek, like Capital, the ‘spectacle-isation’ of war to intimidate; destroying, massacring, and threatening with the atomic bomb, in the same way that ‘terrorism’ has sought the symbolic, devastating blow.

Of course, we are certainly not the ones deluded by the ‘expropriating strike’. The ‘proletarian war’ still presupposes the seizure of political power in one or more States, for its expansion at a general level. But we do not have atom bombs at our disposal: they would make no sense in the class war, as terrestrial as terrestrial could be. From the Sputniks to the ‘Star Wars’, do you remember? Escapisms to forget that the enemy is at home, not even just in the enemy State.

Until the proletariat has disarmed its bourgeoisie it is useless for it to delude itself into attacking the bourgeoisies of other countries. In fact, our ‘tactic’ presupposes that in order to wage war on the bourgeoisie, it is necessary: 1) that strong and combative trade union organisations of economic defence exist; 2) a strong and widespread influence of the Class Party; 3) objective conditions of a crisis not only economic, but moral and political, for the ruling class.

What is to be done, then? Wait with folded hands? This is the accusation the opportunists soon hurled at us, of being ‘determinists’, or worse, ‘nihilists’! We know how it turned out for them, they went over, lock, stock, and barrel, to the service of the enemy. They have confessed that they no longer believe in socialism. They have forgotten that they threatened and eliminated generations of revolutionaries, guilty of not having betrayed the programme and, above all, not being willing to declare bankruptcy, as they did.

The proletarian army is not built in vitro, with whimsical secret strategies, or worse, by declaring ‘humanitarian wars’. Thus our appeal to the daily struggle, to class reorganisation, appears pathetic, as it seems implausible that with the meagre weapons of the class struggle one could deflate the shame of imperialism, the claim of certain cultures to crush others, and other similar clichés.

But, on closer inspection, in reality the bourgeoisie of all countries fears its internal counterpart, and its state apparatus was created precisely in order to organise an instrument to control its offensive potential. This has always been known, even if one is under the illusion that the collapse of ‘real socialism’ may have dispelled all suspicion and fear. The identification of the new monster in ‘international terrorism’ should not deceive: once again, the enemy is not only an objective reality, but also an ideological construction useful for its own ends.

Certainly, if one thinks of the current ‘disarmament’, not only material but also ‘psychological’, of the workers’ movement, one wonders how it will be able to use its weapons again up to the seizure of power. And yet, history is clear: from the very beginnings, made up of resistance and defence, up to the Russian Revolution, there is a dialectical crescendo of organisation and perspective. The proletariat’s ‘atomic weapon’ lies in its programme and its intransigent defence. The daily effort of state organisations, of opportunist trade unionism beholden to the national and transnational interests of the bourgeoisie is to brand as ‘terrorism’ any attempt not to play along, not to give up the struggle in the direction of socialism.

The deployment by imperialism of its war arsenal consists in the will to discourage and intimidate. But already, certain events linked to the war on Afghanistan show that the technological apparatus is not always capable of overcoming the adversary. We are certainly not here, we ourselves, to uphold the ‘superiority’ of the ragged peoples. We adhere to an evaluation of forces in a historical-dialectical, and therefore dynamic, sense, from the perspective that the very same historical realities testify to every day. The animal spirits of capitalism also consist in the pretension to crush proletarian resistance, not only through the exercise of violence, but also through the ideological weakening of the adversary.

The play for the stupefied global audience is on stage. The juxtapositions between Good and Evil are back in vogue with a simplistic yet always effective propaganda. If for the ‘great communicator’ Reagan Evil was the Soviet Empire, for his Republican successor Bush, Evil is Bin Laden and Islamic fundamentalism. The Evil Empire was defeated without bloodshed; for the new Evil that is arising, however, it is necessary to make use of full-scale violence. When war spreads, there seems to be no more time for any ‘distinctions’, and for those who find their justifications by appealing to the ‘iron laws of nature’, it seems that the game is already won.

It cannot be denied that the scale of terrorism is shocking from the point of view of emotional impact, that it seems to disrupt the normal activities, the ‘normal dealings’ typical of bourgeois ‘civil society’, understood as a ‘society of interests’ within a rigid world order. And on the basis of this upheaval, the response that imperialism gives is, as always, a ‘misunderstanding’: it is proposed and asserted that it wants to defeat Evil, and at the same time to continue ‘normal life’. What normal life? That, of course, of the mode of production and of the relations between men, societies, and states as hitherto established up to now.

Whenever the terrorist threat is unleashed, everything pertaining to class (which in our tradition means an organised ‘fleet’, disciplined in its path toward socialism) becomes complicated and entangled. The struggle becomes more difficult: every firm and rigorous defence of one’s own class tends to be speciously mistaken as terrorist. Yet the class has no alternative: it must continue to call itself by its own name, to defend the proletarians in the workplace, whatever their creed and position. But we must say more: it cannot be denied that when the class struggle languishes, the worst spirits of capitalism itself, the relations of the bourgeois fractions at a general level, come alive. How can one fail to see the condition of a new ‘slavery’ affecting large sections of the proletariat?

In the face of this phenomenon, the metropolitan petty bourgeois are incapable of going beyond folkloric battles that would put an end to ‘balls sewn by children’... They fail to see the connection with the needs of Capital, which seeks new blood, preferably at an ever lower price! The new slavery is nothing but ‘globalised’ imperialism. Not born yesterday, as an endless array of fools make a show of believing. Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism: this is how it manifests itself in the current reality.

There are no recipes of any kind to discipline, to regulate this process: certainly not, amid so much empty chatter, the ‘polycentric’ and multilateral game of ‘powers’, as fashionable sociologists are at pains to theorise. The irresistible verticalisation of powers is made manifest by the inevitable financial mergers, which embrace and enchain the entire world.

For our part, we reiterate our positions. War, in today’s capitalist society, fulfils its function as ‘creative destruction’: to perpetuate the law of profit, war is necessary. After endless promises of milk and honey, imperialism does not contradict itself: it must wage war. We still live in the prehistory of humanity, Marx warned. We are obliged to maintain our position with absolute rigour: to break the vicious circle of war it is necessary to cut the roots of Capital. The false alternatives against imperialist war are either Dühring-style arguments, or ‘pacifist’ dreams, which at the appropriate time will be thwarted in the name of the ‘legitimate defence’ of the Fatherland, of the Nation, of the ‘Peace’.

Stomaching the necessity of revolutionary war to break the spiral of war is, today, a difficult answer, harsh for most. As is, moreover, recognising the necessity of the State in order to free ourselves from States. But the end, however distant and not within reach, remains the same, to abolish war, which will have no reason to exist in the Species Society. If such a lofty prospect today brings a smile to the cynicism cloaked in good intentions of capitalist society, we nevertheless harbour no doubts about it.

The choristers of capitalism with the war have rediscovered the ‘tragedy’, the ‘epic’ of the bourgeoisie. For them, it is obligatory to mask the prosaic reasons of interests, too vulgar, too plebeian. Since – at least on this we agree with these gentlemen – one cannot be killed for oil (much less than for Danzig or Kabul!), it is normal for the more subtle among them to go looking for the historical, or even meta-historical, reasons for war.

Heroism, selfless self-sacrifice always appeals to the audience; in the days after 11 September, the ‘New York firefighters’ were extolled, the patriotic civic spirit that only tragedy seems able to evoke. Marx had already stated that if History repeats itself, it becomes farce: the grotesque takes the place of the epic.

Historical materialism had no difficulty in recognising the bourgeois class’s intentions and desire for enterprise as useful and inspiring for all humanity; without, however, renouncing to see clearly in its bad and false consciousness. The capitalist mode of production cannot produce without destroying, not only according to the ‘natural’ dialectic inherent in the things of nature, but – and it is this that will bring about its downfall – through its short-sightedness in not recognising when the time has come to cede power to the Species, once its energies have expressed all that lay within their power. There is no historical organism, group, or class, that is not subject to the law of nature.

The Party is on a completely different side from the denunciations of reactionary origin that propose ‘new rules’ to a globalisation ‘in itself not negative’. Our doctrine goes beyond capitalism, and not backwards, into the dream of an Arcadian community harmonised by goodwill.

At this point, the waste of energy and nature wrought by imperialism outweighs its benefits: indeed, the effort of persuasion that capitalism tries to make is that of recognising the necessity and the physiology of destroying in order to produce. War must therefore become a normal condition, to be managed by ‘deconstructing’, as generations of intellectuals have been taught to do, who have attempted to document, if not to flaunt, the beauty of mangled bodies, of eloquent rubble, and of so many other uglinesses elevated to the dignity of ‘art’!

We will never accept the idea that war is inevitable! War is inevitable only from the perspective of capitalist interests! That is why we cannot give up our long-held positions: 1) there exists no political class without a Party; 2) the ‘statistical’ class, in itself, cannot set itself political goals; 3) while revolution cannot be conjured up through force of will, without the will of the Party, there is no outlet for the struggle.

The very formula ‘war on war’ is meaningless unless conditions of revolutionary crisis between the classes occur; but once it does, the Party cannot passively wait for events to take their ‘natural’ course.

There are those who tend to believe that, once the disruptive elements have been defeated, the ‘terrorism’ that strikes without warning and disrupts ‘normal daily life’, things can continue as before, as usual.

Once again, the illusion is entertained of carrying out a ‘blitz’ so decisive and surgical as to set things right. We are of the conviction, not so much that ‘after 11 September’ everything has changed, but that the inevitable solution lies, on the part of Capital, in getting used to living together in a natural conflict in which war and peace can exchange roles in the possible increase of the Rate of Profit.

From the scientific point of view, that is, of the most reliable description possible of the balance of power, it is essential to understand how the alliances, the oppositions, the inevitable ‘waltz turns’ among the powers will evolve. On the world stage, it is a matter of ‘specifying’ and describing which forces we are talking about. It is necessary to identify the possible scenarios of the conflict in the case of the situation that has arisen with the crisis of the Yalta agreements, with the increasingly evident cracks that set the antagonistic forces of Capital against one another.

We do not even want to hint at this here, but as a criterion to adhere to a psychology of war based on artfully disseminated ‘information’ is completely to be avoided, betting as much on the ‘truthfulness’ of individual war episodes as on the actual agreements, temporary counter-assurances that seem to bind friends and foes together. Let us recall that, at the outset of the First World War, in the first decade of the twentieth century, while the bourgeoisie boasted of dancing and having fun as it had never done before (la belle époque), amidst incidents, provocations, and rehearsals of conflict, the powers plotted behind the official treaties, preparing other scenarios, with ‘counter-assurance’ treaties, secret clauses for every eventuality. Naturally, Italy sticks out, accustomed to the ‘waltz turns’ that would secure it undisputed supremacy in this kind of sport.

But even the great powers, all hardline and uncompromising, were dead serious, Russia and Germany continuing to do so even before the Second World War. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact is a striking example of this, which meant unbelievable disappointments and cramps for Stalinist opportunists in every country. Since history, despite opinions to the contrary, is still somehow ‘magistra’, we have to expect everything in this Third War scenario.

How can one delude oneself that Russia would allow itself to be encircled, from the Baltic countries to the former satellite states, and from Poland to Bulgaria, and then, along a broad latitudinal belt, it sees a belt of military occupations being organised, stretching from Albania to the Caucasus all the way to the Indian Ocean, pretending to agree, to back the Western powers? It is clear that, according to the classic chess-playing attitude, the Russians are forced to play defensively, entrenched in the expectation of better times for the economy, trying to get their chestnuts out of the fire from their temporary partners. It is certain, however, that within the imperialist games, no one can delude themselves into thinking that they can oust Russia from its role in the great Asian-Western reality.

As well as China, which everyone takes for an emerging country, with its ‘capitalist communism’! How is it possible to believe that the great power, with 1.3 billion inhabitants, will put itself on the cart of Western interests, without taking advantage of the situation that sees it hegemonic in south-east Asia, with Japan tarnished, but still the second or third industrial power in the world? So beware of treaties, but more so of secret agreements being prepared behind the back and without the knowledge of those concerned.

The proof of what we say can be seen in the dance that is unfolding before our eyes: the USA’s call for ‘solidarity’ among Westerners against the ‘invisible enemy’ clashes with their determination to lead the ‘crusade’ without question. The allies, in turn, while on the face of it not failing to express their support, are each trying to carve out a position of privilege in relation to the benefits that will follow. Europe is divided between its close relatives (the United Kingdom) and its long-standing competitors, such as France, mindful of the Gaullist tradition that has always demanded its own autonomy, especially in foreign policy; and Germany, which does not lose sight of its geopolitical relationship with Russia. Let us not mention Italy, suspected, as always, of being the unreliable ally.

In short, one has to know how to read ‘between the lines’ of a patriotic rhetoric, of ‘civilisation’, but which thinks above all of hiding true and unconfessed ambitions. We still seem to hear the classic Napoleonic ‘on s’engage, puis on voit’. Of course, if the war is ‘global’ and the interests are global, the network of alliances and probable reversals is more complicated than in the past.

Each State fights its own forms of war, with one eye on the foreign front and the other on the home front, according to the proper function of each state machine. It is necessary to be aware of these games and combinations in order to be able to assess and predict their moves. Psychological warfare is fought on a thousand fronts, in a tangle of contradictions: it is up to us not to fall into any trap, reminding the proletariat that everything is moving behind its back, to harness it in advance with a campaign that tends to ensnare it in anticipation of its inevitable jolts.

We take pride in having always said that, sooner or later, after the lullings and the promises, the bourgeoisie would break the deadlock, would have to take the initiative against the stagnant situation.

Just as, in its time, in certain home fronts, we say: Against terrorism and against imperialism, two sides of the same coin, the former a creature of the latter. Despite the fact that, in the countries ‘of freedom’, the bass drum admits no choice: either with us or against us! Already heard, this refrain, meant only for the media, certainly not for those who know the conditions and tricks of the anti-proletarian war.

The external ‘enemy’ generally re-consolidates internal dissensions: in this way, the first to be affected are the proletarians, who have their own home front to fight permanently, if they want to survive and have a future. When one hears certain appeals to the ‘Tricolour’, to the flag, which had not been heard for some time, it means that there is a reason.

We must steer clear from the rhetoric of others and even of our own. It is not with ‘revolutionary’ phraseology that the real battle is fought, but by not deviating from the right line, which is the historical one. War on war is not simply a word or a slogan: it entails consistent and tough attitudes to uphold. Our function today is this: to be at the side of the proletarians resisting at work, to do what we can to influence their behaviour, but also to know that the cohesion or dispersion of forces is the product of long historical relapses, which cannot be resolved with a magic wand, but with patience, perseverance, and organisation.

That is why we have always hammered home the necessity of proletarian class organisations as a condition for political recovery as well.

It is about representing in a credible, truthful way, beyond phraseology, what the real, current condition of the class is.

No one more than us considers the political level to be central, but on the condition that one remembers that beneath the political superstructure lies the economy, the forces, the interests, according to the play of contradictions typical of the capitalist mode of production. Is it not perhaps one of the most obvious aberrations of terrorism, of any political colour, the illusion of proceeding by means of willpower that would educate, mould, and so on? We have always said and even codified that without the presence and strength of powerful workers’ economic defence organisations, no real political initiatives are conceivable.

In the imperialist phase of Capital, the correct attitude has been to fight and refute the typically opportunist illusion of making the Party, or worse the parties (when they were legitimately the condition of the proletarian movement) a ‘boite à lettres’, that is, an organisation that was also ‘international’, but only for consulting with each other, for transmitting information with each other. The great battle of the Left, when the International was reborn from the First Imperialist War, was to cut every bridge with those who did not want that organisation to centralise at a world level, without regard for national or sectional reasons. To the point that the positions ‘of the left’ appeared rigid to Lenin himself. Of course ours was not meant to be a testimony of a ‘leftism’ that does not tolerate being bypassed, but rather an expression of determinism, which we have no need to take back.

In short, our version was that in the imperialist phase the class must equip itself on the world scale, both economically and politically. Our position has not changed since then, and ‘globalisation’ has proved us right. Today everyone is in favour of the ‘world network of interests and trade’, including those opportunists who reproached us for not understanding the reasons of national factors, the derogations required to join the world political organisation of the proletariat. We know by now what became of them; there is no need to emphasise that they were already in bad faith back then, and the facts have put them with their backs to the wall. They had to cowardly abjure, admit that they were not only wrong, but that they were part of a consortium of ‘political criminals’!

We will no longer concern ourselves with them, who at this stage are polishing the wings of the second-hand planes of their adopted Fatherland. Instead, we want to concern ourselves with the needs that weigh upon the class.

The verticalisation of imperialist processes has not been matched by a progressive centralisation of the proletariat; on the contrary, there has been a systematic dismantling even of the nationalised forms of corporative defence. The imbalance could not be greater and more severe.

This does not detract from the fact that in spite of the vassalisation of the economic defence bodies, formerly class-based, the workers’ struggle continues and will continue as long as this type of social system is in force. But we cannot content ourselves with this: it will never be enough to call on proletarians to fight in the workplace, in an attempt to reorganise the class, to establish contacts of solidarity with anyone who fights, and in any country whatsoever, in this perspective. Class entails unity of command and common ends. Without this there is only a chaotic scramble, dispersion, defeat.

Then, if in the heat of battle betrayal was able to disrupt the class that was still strong, capable of fighting, today, after 80 years of vicissitudes that have seen the proletariat forced into a deadly Second War, into the conquest of its organisations by the state apparatus, you will have an idea of the prohibitive conditions in which that organism we call the Party moves, reduced to a number of militants who might appear to be a group of witnesses, or of Japanese left in the jungle without knowing that the war is over. With a crucial difference: that we are aware, that the war, our war, at the moment, is postponed, that we have no illusions of restarting history with slogans. At a certain point, some militants stepped aside, thinking that, in due course, History would see to it to put them back into play on its own. The scenarios in which the Party finds itself moving cannot be invented.

The reconnaissance on the concrete ground of the conditions of the class are there for all to see. But it is also true that imperialism, even with the need to manipulate the theatres of both war and peace, cannot arbitrarily avoid the gauntlet of the fall in the rate of profit. Even the so-called ‘economists’, even if playing the system’s more or less open game, have acknowledged, from Samuelson to ‘our’ less renowned ones, such as the aforementioned Alvi, that ‘the recession preceded the terrorist war’. How could one not think – and thinking ill is diabolical, but necessary! – that the opportunity was seized, that it was in some way provoked, in order to pre-empt, according to the tried and tested formula of the pre-emptive strike?

Even when one pretends to have finally figured out the new enemy, identified in the invisible one of terrorism, the fixed thought of bourgeois governments and States can only be that of the resurgence of the threat and of the communist spectre. We are surprised, indeed, that no thought has been given to ‘cahoots’... as has always been done! Certainly it is not easy to look for links between the communist revolution and the Islamic Ummah... but they are capable of anything!

The war, be it the one in Korea, the one in Vietnam, or the one against Iraq, has consistently found a proletariat reduced to fighting battles for its defence within organisations already compromised by the enemy. In the phases in which each bourgeoisie arms itself to fight an external enemy, its state machine forges new alliances to weaken the class. Its basic function is this. The worst possible condition for the proletariat to gain experience in fighting for its own interests.

After all, the shift by certain representatives of the workers’ movement from international struggle to national mobilisation marked the birth of fascism. Since then, the model has never been surpassed. We have always maintained that the proletariat’s tendency to descend onto the terrain of ‘national production’ to strengthen the State is equivalent to being captured by the enemy. We were not fooled by the ‘return to democracy’ after the Second World War; fascism had lost the formal battle, but not the substantive one, in its valuable service to Capital. Since new proletarian organisations, on the rubble of this defeat, cannot be conjured up by preaching, the problem remains that of assessing the margins of manoeuvre that capitalism has in relation to the crumbs to be shared and let fall from its banquet.

Certainly, each time imperialism unleashes war, new divisions are determined, not only territorial but for resources of all kinds; new arrangements are drawn up that exalt the ringleader of alliance and competition together. The situation in which we find ourselves sees the USA forced to act decisively in the face of a truly worrying drop in the average rate of profit, despite its much-vaunted capacity for ‘technological innovation’.

Under these conditions, the proletariat is forced to increasingly retreat its defensive lines, not only on a regional scale but sometimes myopically, or forcibly, local, corporate, and even smaller. The threat of crisis, continually looming, increases worker competition, suspicion toward ‘brothers’ perceived as enemies. Despite everything, however, the statistical class exists, and no bourgeois magic wand can make it irrelevant. If it is true that labour increasingly burdens a thin base of proletarians, while an increasingly large number is sidelined, adding to the mass of the unemployed, or of those who have to make do with ultra-precarious work, this means that the ‘service society’ has had to admit that it is by no means the solution to all ills. In America, managers who had touched success and dollars firsthand, ask for a public job at the post office, despite the danger of... anthrax!

The great world rearrangements in the resource and labour markets will be decisive in testing class reorganisation. These alignments of forces are not manoeuvrable by some voluntary hand, but if anything and to a large extent by the invisible hand of the class struggle, by necessity. In the history that has unfolded up today, we have proof that the great moments of class alignments have not been the ostentatious or voluntarist gestures, but rather the necessities that have entailed not only the resistance organisations, but also the formation of workers’ parties, right up to the selection of the sole International Party, with all the ups and downs of this process. We have deciphered this reality, and identified in the Party the only conscious force capable of not losing sight of a method and guiding compass. If this seems small, take a look at those forces that had flaunted ‘alternative programmes’: they have all ended up in the logic of Capital, today they are its miserable prop, becoming the fiercest enemies of the proletariat, as always happens with the neophytes of a new creed.

This invites us not to delude ourselves, but also not to lose sight of the fundamental tasks, which are not those of declaring war without an army, with a small group of militants posing as ‘generals’. We stand by the realistic and dialectical reading of the situation. The war economy, we know, has the power either to tighten the ‘producers’ around Capital with the explicit threats of choosing a ‘side’, or of enhancing its potential for rebellion: but these two poles are not automatic. Neither the appeals of the bourgeoisie nor the violence of its state machine have the power to bind the class to its chariot, nor the Party as its organ to direct it toward the fulfilment of its historical ends: because for the second option, which is the vital one that interests us, to be realised, it is necessary that the class is not on its knees, but combative and combatant. In the experience of the past we find endless lessons. During the First Imperialist War, despite the fact that the left currents proved themselves to be consistent without ever bending to opportunism, even the less right-wing kind (which in Italy turned into the sibylline and ambiguous formula ‘neither support nor sabotage’), the explicit formation of a world centre was late, albeit correct and powerful.

The proletariat as a statistical class could never by itself have attempted to turn the war between States into revolution, without the International. That is what the opportunists either deluded themselves, or made others delude themselves, into thinking they could do, and with this attitude they lent themselves to pressure from the states, even to the point of postponing the revolution until the war was over. In the Second War, even more foul, there was proof that the same counter-revolutionary process could not be overturned simply because it was clear to our current.

Never have we thought of disregarding the forces in the field and their historical orientation. This warns us, even for the present, not to underestimate the fact that for us force does not mean a contingent reality, but always something coming from afar and capable of aiming far. This is why we have for decades hammered on the need for a purely workers’ and class-based defensive organisation, on pain of the inevitable fate of suffering events, however negative or positive they may manifest themselves. In a war economy, if anything, either the worst defects or the best qualities are accentuated; there is no middle ground to fall back on. It is evident, then, that only those who have been able to work in advance, in the right direction, will have the upper hand.

The bourgeoisie, in each country, has on its side the advantage of having the state machine at its disposal; the proletariat, which cannot renounce ‘making itself into a State’, lacks this necessary means. The class today is torn apart by an infinite number of currents that practise and theorise, more or less lucidly, anarchoidism, the illusion that it can emancipate itself without the necessary instruments.

In these disadvantaged conditions, one should harbour no illusion that it can climb back up the slope the easy way. Whoever thinks this and propagates it assumes grave responsibility, or else renounces his project forever. Which is what historical opportunism had ignominiously done, which in no uncertain terms had declared forfeit after having persecuted the true revolutionaries for decades.

Since sermons do not make history, all that remains is to point out to the class its prospects, not failing to emphasise each time the tasks and struggles to be carried out. During the war, which is already taking the shape of a long-term conflict, and which will entail the resurgence of protectionism and defensive illusions, imperialism is showing its face: with an impressive swiftness it shifts from the theory of the free market at all costs, to the rediscovery of state intervention, of the centralised direction of military and economic action.

One should no longer be surprised at anything: whoever gives or has given confidence to petty politicians weathered by every storm find themselves at the mercy of their chameleon-like opportunism, now taken as a virtue, as a skill in manoeuvring, in the face of which consistency of positions is dogmatism, doctrinaireism, inconclusive rigidity.

What is ‘new’ is that a war defined as ‘terrorist’ prevents the polarisation of forces, tends to mobilise psychologically, by terrorising and blackmailing in turn, as the system of Capital has always done. In workplaces – it is important that proletarians remember this – every act of insubordination and indiscipline will be seen as defeatism, as anti-patriotism. We know these terms and these behaviours inside out: but the class finds itself having to repeat the lesson. On the other hand, to repeat in our version does not mean to mutter litanies, but to re-propose the question, literally re-propose the issue.

The most advanced Western Christianity, that of the Protestant persuasion, has asserted that peace is not possible without freedom of conscience, and has produced the political freedoms won by the French revolution. These will not be followed by social freedom, freedom from need, a mirage, in this system of life, for billions of human beings. Our perspective, to be re-proposed in the age of overt globalisation, is this: the point of view to which we refer is not restricted to the aristocratic proletarian classes nor to metropolitan fortresses, but includes the unemployed, the manual labourers, the recruited from among the pariahs, all under the direction of a political body that knows how to see, dialectically, on a planetary level.

Is it a utopia, a mirage in its own right? Well then, we have no intention of giving it up. If we did, we would have to fall in line with so-called ‘reformism’ (which at least today no longer speaks of ‘socialism’), not of emancipation of the proletarian class but at best of accommodation of the uncontrolled, rule-less society of turbo-capitalism. We do not fall in line, not so much out of love for a Thesis, but because reality dramatically shows that social relations are not only not improving, but are reaching, by admission of the very supporters of the system, the lowest point of ‘sociality’, of attention to the conditions of the dispossessed. Thus, schizophrenically, while on the one hand it is admitted, on the other, in the name of the reason of Capital, the gap between those who accumulate and those who every day see their possibilities, not to speak of improvement, but of survival, reduced. Let us stick to global data, which speak of some two billion people cut off by overwork, hunger, disease.

We thus have nothing to change to our programme, which has been global and international since the nineteenth century. Thus, just as the Party was reconstituted in 1945 as International Communist, without any other artificial terms, our function was and remains that of reiterating the fundamental points of the programme itself. Our historic attitude, as Marx put it, to ‘def[y] the momentary opinions of the proletariat’, against every form of demagogy and tailism, is not new. Besides, how could we trail behind the so-called masses when, in particular, they are blocked by the opposing tide? The fact is that we sanctify neither the word proletariat, nor even the word dear to democrats, namely people. How could we, especially today, place revolutionary rhetoric above revolutionary development?

Here is the point. But revolutionary development is now without possibility, without a future. This is what the opportunists have said, placing a tombstone over their entire shameful history. And so, we say, either there will be class revival, new disciplines determined by necessary struggles, or else we will have the ‘ruin of all classes’. The cycle of imperialist fortunes, founded on general massacres, seems closed. The concern of the lead figures was explicitly confessed even before the massacre of the ‘towers’; it is not possible to overturn the fetid stagnation without resorting to a protracted war. If the theatre of operations proves stifling, there is always the possibility of expanding it to at least 50 ‘rogue states’, potential lairs of the invisible enemy.

If it becomes necessary, the war will not be a 10-year war, like the classic Trojan war, but the Trojan horse for a conflict without end and without respite. The class cannot wait to reorganise itself until the war is over, as the opportunist currents have always thought and promised. During and against the war this must take place, not with striking gestures, but through resistance to the pressure of Capital, at the workplace, by linking, as much as possible, the outbursts of struggle and organisation. There are examples of battles taking place in various areas of the world, of proletarians who find themselves having to resist.

But the drumbeat of war has entirely different matters to think about and to ‘communicate’. Entire states risk plunging into bankruptcy. Within them, working-class fractions are locked in their local and regional spheres: so much for globalisation! Liberalism – we have said ad nauseam – is but the other face of protectionism, which coexists alongside it, and not alternately. The two globalisations, the imperialist one and the workers’ one, do not mechanically mirror each other. On the contrary, when liberalism celebrates its triumphs, it means that it squeezes the proletarian base as never before, nullifies its organisations, exports competition within it, triggers a knife fight between proletarian and proletarian, along lines of race, religion, political creed. Just as political liberalism and economic liberalism do not automatically correspond, so too are freedom of movement of commodities and workers’ organisational capacity, solidarity, politics, not easily exchanged. Otherwise, in what would the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production and distribution consist? This must be taken into account if we are to have a non-rhetorical, but credible and objective representation of the class’s condition. The proletarian fleet needs more than ever to recover its navigation, which if it will never be easy and peaceful, must at least have a purpose, a direction.

The impossible reformism of the ‘democrats’ travels along the mephitic shores of Capital and lands at the first port that suits them. So much for the Columns of Hercules to be crossed, which have always been ours to claim! The class cannot be embarked upon by some new Party, or by makeshift coalitions that generically refer to ‘progress’, to new rules to propose to savage capitalism. The history of the twentieth century has selected a Party-form on a world scale, not only as an organisational perspective, but as a programme to be realised, against other centuries of struggles and tragedies. There are no alternatives.

The dimension of ‘time’ for us has a meaning that is not, as it is for politicians, in months or years, but in historical turning points, which we do not claim to conjure up, to decide.

Yet, on the basis of our texts and, above all, our commitment to struggle, it has long been the case that the study of the cyclical trend of capitalism tells us that global society as a whole cannot continue to live in these moribund conditions. An economic system that – in addition to literally crushing billions of proletarians and seeing even the conditions of natural and biological equilibrium compromised – has over time become an increasing threat to its own reproduction.

The challenge that is being played out at the general level, even if named and kept exorcistically hidden, is the one between the vital forces of labour, and the formalised ones of profit and the positional rents connected to it.

Already by the end of the 80s, we had indicated in our graphs the alternative crisis – war or revolution. If we have entered the new century and millennium without witnessing the hoped-for systematic resurgence of class struggle and reorganisation, it is because decades, within a historical mode of production, matter less than they feel when lived through by a few units that do not give up and keep the proletarian tradition alive. The trickle of events that accompanies epochal crises extends even for centuries: just think of the end of the Roman Empire and even the Middle Ages. Therefore, we do not make it a calendar issue, as is trivially fashionable.

Certainly, moreover, the challenge is not reducible to rustic duels or individual confrontations, according to Western folklore, between the bandit and the sheriff. The clash is between alternative systems of life, in general, productive and cultural. The challenge, as our past testifies, is not a subjective attitude, a polemical disagreement, but a historical project, determined by forces that no one can either evoke or neutralise with ‘will’. This is what it is all about, beyond media-related simplifications. It is up to the Party not to shy away from a critical evaluation, which finds in its programme the foundation and reasons for its future activity.

Historically, the violence of war is opposed to communist society. In order to wage war on war in a real and concrete way, it is necessary that the forces in the field be identified, their strength assessed, the objectives they set for themselves and which take shape in their dynamic unfolding.

The end does not justify the means. Pacifism, of various kinds, claims to oppose the means of non-violence (always relative, however, since absolute non-violence is contradicted by the practice of ‘legitimate defence’, which the same Churches recognise and with which they justify the reprisals of States...) to the violence perpetrated by the proponents of political realism. Our position, often instrumentally identified as ‘violent’, considers violence as necessary as a lever, so that the old society may give birth to the new forces it has incubated within itself. Some have said: who taught the chick to break the eggshell? No one.

Those who believe that peace responds to a ‘pedagogy’, to a preaching of non-violence, close their eyes, pretending not to see how the great social organisations, which in the modern age have culminated in the state and super-state apparatuses (with a deployment of force capable of killing every individual on Earth not just once, but at least three times) cannot be converted into philanthropic social organisations by burying one’s head in the sand. We might as well appeal to the divine who, by a gratituitous act, delivers men from the evil they themselves have caused!

When a Heidegger, after his well-known implications with Nazism, claimed after the fact that ‘only God can save us’, he only revealed his usual nature: his political predictions had been proven wrong, his idea of Germany, as bogus as that of so many willing collaborators in the National Socialist programme... etc.

It follows that philosophy is certainly not the Prince’s best counsellor. The proletarian militia responds to quite different determinations: the necessity of war against Capital.

The imperialist epoch of Capital should have taught us something with regard to theoretical failures: think of Stalinist schematism, according to which the First World War would have seen the emergence of the proletariat in Russia, the Second the formation of the ‘socialist camp’, and the Third would have had to see the global triumph of socialism!

The means/ends nexus has never seen such serious deviations and theoretical blasphemies. In the case of the Communist Left, the intransigent defence of theory against triumphant opposing forces has cost immense sacrifices, which only the end can worthily repay.

Today, faced with the creeping Third World War, in a situation that the proletariat is not proving capable of overturning to its advantage, one has the impression that the ‘terrorist tool’ might make inroads into generations of the dispossessed in the poorest countries, who have seen themselves disappointed by countless other ‘shortcuts’ in the class struggle. Who knows what ‘hidden’ laughter the ‘conspirators’ have had and will continue to have in the face of our minimal action, characterised by the presentation of the programme without reticence! We certainly do not do it out of naivety, nor out of generic heroism. None of this. Every form of struggle that does not take into account the molecular reality of capitalism, the complex struggle on various fronts, first and foremost the social one, is doomed to failure. For this reason, our activity must appear, even to the organs of the State, as ‘romantic’ or an expression of hopeless fatalism.

It is that even Capital itself and its political personnel now elude any long-term plan deserving the name of social project. It is what we have always said, the bourgeoisie has never been able to express its sole party, and when it has tried to do so, see fascism and Nazism, as well as Stalinism, it has done so in order to strengthen its state machine to the point of identifying itself with it.

If, over time, individualistic theories have developed, which have theorised the precedence of individual rights against the State, right up to certain contemporary currents of anarcho-capitalism vegetating in the USA, these are reactions of the petty bourgeoisie against the interventionist State, which constitutes the armed organ of the interests of big Capital, both at home and abroad. Only in the communist conception does the proletarian State stand beneath the Party, before, during, and after the seizure of power. If this paradigm does not materialise, something is wrong: this is what we saw when, with ‘socialism in one country’, we witnessed a strengthening of the state machine, accompanied by the disintegration of the Party, which had become something else, having gone over into the service of bourgeois interests.

Our challenge against war, produced by the tensions between imperialist States, cannot be carried forward without these fundamental theoretical premises. If we were to forget them, we would be venturing into territory that is not our own, treacherous and dangerous.

So, first of all, the Party, however infinitesimal in scale, must not forget to repeat these notions, and repeat them to itself. Organisation comes next, as we have always maintained. Little wonder, then, that in the course of its half-century-long struggle, the Party has never been tempted to sketch out its own ‘military’ organ, as petty-bourgeois currents, sick with activism and adventure, have demanded. Military force, which cannot be something foreign to the Party, is not autonomous and independent from the course of the social struggle.

During the Russian Revolution, conditions arose that saw the proletarians in arms turn their rifles on the supporters of the imperialist war. The current reality of a creeping war, still dominated by ‘professional’ armies, mercenaries in the pay of Capital, is even more complex. To Machiavelli, mercenary troops appeared dangerously unusable for the national-popular cause. Judging by the way the fighting in Iraq is going, it seems they are of little use to the imperialist cause either. Is it conceivable, in a phase of an internationally mounting social revolution, for the monstrous war machines of Capital, which are not just made of steel and electronics, to be emptied-out from within, to jam? It is certain that it is only for counter-revolutionary purposes that bourgeois States have suspended mandatory conscription in order to turn to ‘professional warfare’, conducted with mercenary corps trained in the various specialities of the fight against the internal and external enemy. The bourgeois casemates are increasingly barricading themselves in defensively. As, moreover, the ‘illegal’ groups who say they are fighting against the US superpower and its ally are doing.

How is it possible to form a proletarian army under these conditions, and how to direct its action? Only the developments of a resurgent struggle at the general and social scale will be able to clarify the question. Once again, we have proof that it is not possible to think about the military question as such, independently of the struggle waged in the workplaces that restores discipline to the soldiers of labour.

The war against the ‘invisible enemy’ is a good reason and pretext for mobilising the most heterogeneous forces, kept in a state of permanent alarm, or else for lulling to sleep the search for the real reasons for peace and war, with the emergency at the door. It will remain to be seen how much and how long this kind of strategy will last. In the meantime, the weapon with which the powers vie for the strategic regions of the world is revealed, according to a deployment of garrisons that correspond, even visually, to the presence of resources deemed strategic for the production and provisioning of competing capitalist fractions.

Proletarian involvement, as was the case with classic colonial wars, seems to be replaced by the terrorist threat and ideologically covered with moralisms, ranging from humanitarian war to the disarmament of rogue States. But, come to think of it, the tactics remain the same: deploying forces in the field, forcing them to take sides, pre-emptively blocking every attempt at proletarian struggle for its own class interests.

The bourgeoisie, in its centuries-long confrontation with the proletariat, knows well that the tactic to disrupt the workers’ army consists in preventing its class organisation. We know well how these methods of combat have unfolded. Ever since 1791, with the Le Chapelier law in France, the bourgeoisie banned workers’ associationism, in the name of individual personal freedoms. Later, under pressure from the proletarian army, it recognised trade union associations, first in England, then in France. In the imperialist epoch it tends, first with fascism, then with democracy, to hollow out the organisations of struggle and integrate them into the state apparatus, considering purely workers’ struggles as ‘anti-national’. What’s more, in the various countries, trade union struggles tend to take on a class significance the more the bourgeoisie demonstrates that it does not hesitate to fight them as enemies of public order, almost returning to its beginnings.

Behind this trend in the way the bourgeois State presents itself to the workers’ movement, it implicitly appears that the proletariat is already by definition an ‘army’, with its own, more or less definitive, discipline. The more the workers’ army is disciplined, structured within its real organisations, the more it is feared by the adversary; the more it shows itself to be infiltratable by the State, by its anti-worker parties, the more it is at the mercy of the class enemy.

Therefore, the army is not a purely military notion. If the class demonstrates that it has its own direction, and shows that it is pursuing it, then, at the moments which history never fails to bring about, it will be able to take its own initiatives, even those specifically military, in the sense of arms, of deployment in the field, and battles to win or even to lose, as is typical of every war.

That in the factory the proletarian army learns discipline is the product of the very regime of capitalist labour: the factory regime – the name says it all – entails, in some way, a regimentation within the ranks of production. Today it is argued that Fordism’s decline, cellular and network production, would have led to a kind of demobilisation. The truth is that only the trade union organisation, which gathers not the majority, but sometimes only a certain part of the entire class, has historically provided discipline to the proletarians; in particular those union currents influenced by the Party, which do not limit themselves to proposing the struggle for economic reasons, but the more properly general political struggle. As we can see, the proletarian ‘army’ entails a selection: not all will be worker soldiers; a large part will be assigned to other functions.

Certainly, the practice of struggle, in whatever form, enables one to know and experience the harshness of capitalist relations of production. What matters is the continuity of this practice, its transmission across generations of proletarians.

It is this heritage that alarms the bourgeois State which, through its machine, tries in every way to appropriate class fragments, to involve them in its logic of submission and opportunism. It is also necessary to refer to the fact that, in the course of history, trade union activity, open to all workers, soon involved the influence of political circles that had a very different notion of union discipline and the army as a whole. Some political forces of bourgeois origin do not even speak of the proletarian ‘army’, which they regard as a crew susceptible to a thousand shenanigans and many opportunities for handling. In short, it is not really advisable to refer to such a variegated reality without taking into account the historical necessity of looking after the statistical class in such a way that it becomes ‘political’, that is, that it does not merely make up the numbers, but expresses its potential and its perspective. Without a party, for us, not only would the class remain ‘statistical’, but it would risk being reduced to an army without cadres, without an end.

We have had crucial experiences in this regard. That, in any case, the military function is the most delicate for the Party, there is no doubt. It is not by chance that, historically, it has always claimed it, without sharing it with any other force.

After the seizure of power by fascism, for example, faced with proposals by the Arditi del Popolo to take joint action to fight the squadracce, the Left claimed total autonomy and estrangement from those military formations, which were indeed ‘daring’ and combative. The reason for such ‘jealousy’ is easily understood: the exercise of force for any political and military formation involves the utmost discipline and effectiveness. Moreover, through pressure or intermingling with other forces, it is possible for the programme to be compromised and debased.

In a sense, military action, when of the moment, is the climax, because it leads to the seizure of power, its exercise, the proletarian dictatorship. This as far as the direct relationship between the party and the military question is concerned. On the other hand, as far as the discipline of the proletarian army and the battle with a series of opposing formations is concerned, the problem is even more complex: in the course of the struggle and war there are a thousand rivulets of violence, legal, extra-legal, of formations that follow the directives of the state, of super-state organisations, according to alliances, strategies that are not always clear, that put a strain not only on the military organisation, but also on the political one.

War is the culminating test of the class struggle, harsh and demanding: it is enough to remember the tragic and terrible exploits from 1848, to the Paris Commune, to the Russian 1917, to the post-war period, to all the less exciting events of the twentieth century. In truth, the proletariat of the last 50 years has had no military experiences worthy of the name: today’s Party militants have no personal experience of crucial phases of the workers’ struggle.

In our conception, it is neither possible nor serious to initiate a military strategy that does not or cannot rely on iron discipline, in comparison to which that of the bourgeois States is by definition ‘anarchic’. On this point it is worth clarifying: discipline for us is not membership and an army of tin soldiers. Just as the armies of bourgeois revolutionaries, ostensibly ragtags led by generals made in the field, got rid of the big wigs who came from the academy, so the proletarian one has known geniuses of strategy like Trotsky, who in truth were first and foremost militants of a party tempered by a very long theoretical and practical work.

This we call ‘discipline’; nothing formal, but instead substantial, which cannot be separated from the political Programme, which indeed descends directly from the political programme.

The title ‘general’, a title that was given to Engels, an expert and inquirer into military strategy, is not honorary, but dictated by a general knowledge of issues, from economic to political, philosophical and ideological. In short, a comprehensive preparation, which has made certain of our militants into ‘geniuses’ recognised even by the enemy! Who has any doubts about the political-military capacity of Lenin, of Trotsky, of Tukhachevsky?

In our version, it is not a question of individual ‘intelligence’, but of organic integration, in the party, in the organisation, according to an experience that is not scholastic, but human, proletarian, aware of the great tasks that history knows how to assign, in determinate contexts, to men and forces that have been able to qualify for such serious tasks.

We know that these prerogatives and demands seem foreign in the consumerist and squalid context into which putrid capitalism has thrown the younger generations, devoted to dissipation and the art of narcotic and artificial consolation. We know that proletarians, as such, cannot place themselves outside the petty-bourgeois ideology that corrupts them with the worst of illusion and manipulation.

But we also know that the fire of the struggle is in itself purifying, and it alone will be able to overcome the many degradations that bring no honour either to proletarians or to humanity in general, insofar as they belong to the Species. It is in its name, in fact, that communism fights to emancipate all, even those who have settled into the miseries and shames of class societies. Communism makes belonging to the Species its religion.

Bourgeois ‘barbarism’, in the name of ‘civilisation’, deploys, in peace and in war, hired forces. Every day the proletariat is forced into wage labour. What, on the other hand, characterises the Party as such – and this is not a contradiction – is free and personal adherence, which entails responsibility and discipline. This Party, which tomorrow will lead the resurgence of huge masses, including against the imperialist war, will raise the banner of those rebels who will never again want to be paid.