There are dozens of theories circulating about the ‘end of the Cold War’ that claim to explain its causes. The most idiotic of all seems to be the one – cobbled together by the American press and relaunched by the Italian press – that drags in the old hackneyed argument of the ‘Chinese danger’. According to the authors, the Russo-American rapprochement, made evident by Khrushchev’s trip to America, was imposed by the need to build a global barrier against future expansionist drives... from China. Chinese power, these writers of political fantasy tell us, will inevitably expand, both industrially and demographically, and in the near future will pose a grave danger not only to the West but to Russia itself. Will the great yellow tide not be driven so far as to overwhelm the Russian borders and overflow into the vast Siberian space? Will the Chinese not want to claim for themselves the present Russian Asia, once belonging to Asian peoples and partly to the Chinese Empire and colonised by Tsarism? And who can ignore that already once before, in the Middle Ages, Europe suffered the horrors of the Mongol invasion? And so on and so forth.

The gentleman of the democratic and Atlantic press intend to frighten us, just as in his time another inventor of trashy political novels, Mussolini, attempted to do, by making us believe that Russia and America would be frightened by the ‘Chinese danger’, i.e. a threat that could at most mature in two or three decades – assuming that the industrialisation of Chinese space does not undergo reversals – rather than the current threat posed by the terrifying arsenals that they respectively possess and constantly replenish. But there is more. These gentlemen expect us to believe the most absurd of tall tales, namely that States can plan joint action, set a goal to be achieved, and choose the most suitable path to arrive at it. When has such a thing ever happened, not to mention in the phase of imperialism, but in the entire history of capitalism and the nation-State? There is only one way to bring the States of the world into agreement: to suppress them all and establish a world State on their ruins, governed by the Communist Party. But this is not what we intend to discuss, nor do we intend to discuss the new edition of the political ‘thriller’ that is bringing the ‘Chinese mystery’ back to the front pages of newspapers.

Readers are already familiar with our views on the ‘Cold War’ and ‘détente’. They will recall that not even in the most dramatic moments in the history of these years, did we believe that Russia and the United States were about to take up arms and start the Third World War. We refused to believe it, not because we are convinced that the enormous destructive power of modern weapons has made imperialist war avoidable, but because the results of our study of the conditions of the world capitalist economy ruled out the possibility of the approach of the great catastrophic crisis that will in future pose the dilemma: world war or proletarian revolution.

Nor did we rule out, when all the entire respectable press babbled about ‘iron curtains’ and ‘different and opposed worlds’, a shift in Russo-American relations. On the contrary, we have insisted on the thesis that the two superpowers were in reality tending toward a world condominium. Capitalism and socialism, the bourgeois national and imperialist State and the State of the working class are, according to us, irreconcilable and unfit for coexistence. But in the light of Marxist principles, the Soviet economy cannot be defined as socialist, nor the Moscow State as a State of the working class. This socio-economic analysis led to our thesis, according to which neither political and military conflict, nor coexistence, nor even coalition, can be ruled out in relations between Russia and other states.

Rivalry and conflict cannot be eradicated in the relations between nation-States, guardians and gendarmes in the service of production machines founded on exploitation. The peaceful coexistence of peoples, which does not consist in a truce between one war and another, is only possible in a world to be conquered, in which the production machine is constructed in such a way as to eliminate the exploitation of one class by another and the imbalance between production and consumption inevitably determined by the fact that the fruits of human labour, and human labour itself, are commodities to be exchanged and accumulated. Under capitalism, war is inevitable, because society itself, in every day, in every minute of its existence, is the theatre of a brutal war between the ruling classes and the exploited and oppressed classes. There can be no peace, only armed truces, between States, because within the borders of every State the social war is perpetually underway, which is always war even when the exploited classes can only react to the exploiters with the unequal means of protest and futile electoral competition.

Firmly anchored to these principles, we went through the ‘Cold War’ without ever allowing ourselves to be convinced even for a moment that the political and military conflict between the two blocs was a translation into new forms of the class struggle between capitalism and communism. For the same reasons, the emergence of ‘détente’ did not cause us to lose our bearings. We had considered this eventuality a concrete possibility ever since talk of the ‘Cold War’ first began. How many articles did we publish arguing the thesis that the Russo-American conflict had as its aim not the way to change the world, but to divide it among themselves!

Practically, we will say nothing new, simply restating our views on the much-trumpeted ‘détente’. It will however be useful, while the press in the service of the military blocs spreads false interpretations of the present transition in world politics, to recapitulate what has already been said on the subject on other occasions. How and why did the ‘Cold War’ come to an end? Such questions can be answered, obviously, by first trying to ascertain why the ‘Cold War’ began.

1) The post-war conflict that led to the formation of the great political and military coalitions of the Atlantic Pact and the Warsaw Pact did not originate from the class struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie. The Second World War was the inevitable consequence of the ebb of the revolutionary wave that in the first post-war period led to the formation of the Communist International and to the dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia. The retreat of the communist revolution, mainly due to the treacherous social democracies that in Europe managed to divert the momentum of the masses, and the even more deadly wave of opportunism and renunciation represented by rampant Stalinism, which immobilised them while international fascism was heading towards war, were at the root of the Second Imperialist War. It was absurd to think that Stalinism, the gravedigger of the revolutionary left of the Third International, the sole heir of the Marxist movement and of Leninism, could resume the class war against the capitalist Powers, which it had allied itself with during the conflict.

It is true, however, that in the post-war period the enormous pressure exerted on Russia by the rest of the bourgeois world had the effect of accelerating the process of degeneration and social involution already begun through the work of Stalinism, bringing it to the final phases that are observed today. This is not the place to retrace the history of the backward march of Stalinist Russia – from the first rudimentary forms of communism to the present stage of large industrialism, which is unquestionably capitalist in nature because it is founded on mercantilism, on wage labour, the enterprise division of labour, etc. It is clear, however, that the transition from Stalinism to Khrushchevism, by decentralising the direction of the productive apparatus, substantially reconstituting small peasant property in the pseudo-collectivist forms of the kolkhozy, inflating beyond measure the sphere of commercial activity, has liquidated the residual forms of social control over economic activity that a revolutionary workers’ power must exercise with a view to the socialist transformation of society.

In summary, the ‘Cold War’, examined from a social point of view, has not undermined the power of capitalism outside Russia and its allies, while it has accelerated and brought the more than thirty-year process of capitalist bastardisation of the Russian social structure to completion. The Khrushchevites have succeeded where the Stalinists had not yet succeeded. The ‘Cold War’ has erased any residual social differentiation between the West and East, it has made Russia ‘more similar’ to capitalist countries. And this, anticipating our conclusions, represents one of the factors in the closing of the Cold War.

2) The conflict which, shortly after the end of the Second World War, placed the United States and Russia face to face was not over Europe. This statement may be rejected by those who still believe, being victims of nationalistic or racial prejudices, that Europe, the old Europe that gave birth to capitalism and colonialism, can remain a bone of contention. In reality, Europe has not been up for grabs since the time of the Yalta and Potsdam Conferences (1945), that is, since the time it was irrevocably partitioned. Despite the spectacular aspects assumed by the Berlin crisis (that of the ‘airlift’) or the recent Hungarian uprising, despite the grotesque Sisyphean efforts of Russian and American diplomacy, which periodically stage hypocritical negotiations on the ‘German question’ that regularly end with nothing accomplished, Moscow and Washington have nothing to say to each other about Europe. They have converging interests, inasmuch as they have to fight daily in the old continent against a common enemy: neutralism, or, to be precise, local third-force tendencies.

The past policy of the State Department, which, through Foster Dulles, advocated the ‘liberation of the countries of Eastern Europe’, was in fact a masterpiece of hypocrisy. The United States, even if it could achieve it by forcing a world conflict, would not be pursuing a good policy (from their standpoint) by forcing the Russians to withdraw within their state borders. And the reason is clear. The ‘liberation’ of the people’s democracies would strike at the very roots of the Atlantic Pact, which was founded, or rather imposed, by the United States on a Europe ravaged by war and in need of American ‘aid’, under the pretext of erecting a ‘dam’ against ‘Soviet communism’. After all, every blow that one of Europe’s imperialist masters deals to European nationalism also benefits the other master. Proof of this is the fact that those who oppose ‘détente’, i.e. close cooperation between Moscow and Washington, are precisely the political forces expressed by bourgeoisies – such as those of France and Germany – who have or believe they have the greatest chance to realise a continental ‘third force’, positioned between the colossi of the West and the East.

If the ‘Cold War’ really ends, this will not happen because the United States and Russia have reached an agreement concerning the settlement to be given to Europe. Such an agreement exists, we repeat, since the days of Yalta and Potsdam, and neither side has any interest in changing it. One thing is certain: that the conflicts between European states (see the opposing trade coalitions led by London and the Paris-Bonn axis, the territorial claims involving South Tyrol, the Oder-Neisse line, etc.) are backed up by concrete facts, while the Russo-American conflicts in Europe are merely verbal and on paper.

Naturally, we do not claim to deny what has happened in Europe in past years, and above all we do not ignore what the European peoples have had to suffer due to the outbreak of post-war rivalry between America and Russia. If the people have endured misery, terror, persecutions, and bloody repression, this was also because the already harsh social conditions that capitalism perpetuates, in war as in peace, have been compounded by the imperialist conflict, which locally has served the ruling bourgeoisies to strengthen their own state apparatuses of repression. On the other hand, the spectre of atomic war, constantly evoked by the press and the radio, has not prevented rearmament, but succeeded in throwing the masses into a cowardly social pacifism.

It is well understood that the gangrenous European contradictions occupy a place of relative importance among the root causes of the Russo-American conflict, if it is borne in mind that it was only in Europe, that is, precisely in the continent that had set in motion the Second World War, that it was possible to proceed to a political settlement once hostilities had ceased. Naturally, it was a settlement that resembled very much a straitjacket that the victors of the conflict – and it remains to be seen whether Great Britain can be counted among them, considering the enormous mutilations inflicted on its financial and colonial empire – imposed on the subjugated or ‘liberated’ European peoples. But in any case there was a settlement. The volcano was silenced. For more than four centuries, that is, from the time when the ‘conquistadores’ and slave traders of Christian and civilised Europe began the great chapter of colonisation, it had been erupting death and destruction throughout the world.

3) The ‘Cold War’ was determined by the profound influence exerted on Russo-American relations by the great social upheaval that certainly represents the most important event of this century after the Russian Socialist Revolution: the anti-colonial revolution in the countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. An iron determinism governs the course of history in class societies. The American and Russian armies, meeting in the heart of Nazi Germany, were putting an end to the imperialist primacy of bourgeois Europe. The military occupation aimed to place the Revolution under lock and key, and it succeeded in doing so. But what human force could have immobilised the other continents that were rising up against colonialism? The governments of the victorious states had already prearranged plans for placing the Old Continent under control, and they only needed to perfect them. Implementing them was not difficult, not least because the decrepit European bourgeoisies, now lacking in self-confidence, asked for nothing better than to place themselves under the protection of the victors.

But for the unforeseen outbreak of the anti-colonial revolution, the victors had not, nor could they have prepared, any plans. Indeed, in the mind of the American imperialists there existed the plan to substitute themselves for Japan in the control of East Asia, as the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki prove: nor did the corrupt regime of Chiang Kai-shek certainly constitute an obstacle to American expansionist aims. For not dissimilar reasons, the Russo-Japanese conflict had broken out in 1904. However, Moscow had had to, at least ostensibly, resign itself to the American infiltration in China. Who has forgotten the time when Chiang, a creature of the Americans, figured as the Fifth Great Power? But the Chinese people, tormented by a crisis that had been ravaging the country for over a hundred years, did not accept passively undergoing a new form of colonialism. Nor did the Indians, Indonesians, Burmese, Malays, Arabs, Malagasy, Negroes, that is, the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants of the Earth, accept it.

It had not been enough, in order to resolve the world crisis, to impose on Europe a regime of occupation, which nevertheless was necessary (from the imperialist point of view), since it still lasts today. And how could it have been enough, when no fewer than three continents, hitherto subject to colonialism and semi-colonialism, were simultaneously rising to their feet? The anti-colonial revolution could find support in both Moscow and Washington, because both sought to supplant the old masters in the colonies. But it posed tremendous problems, especially for the Americans, who had to not only counter the actions of the Russians, but also face the revolt of their own allies, who were fiercely struggling to preserve their crumbling colonial empires. One must consider the enormous stakes involved, the vast natural resources locked within the subsoil of the colonial countries, as well as the products of plantations, the territories of strategic importance, and the enormous reserves of very cheap labour power, in order to understand the extent of the upheaval that the anti-colonial revolution caused in the balance between the imperialist powers.

One must imagine in what conditions Russia would find itself today if the American plan for expansion into the immense Chinese space had succeeded. And in what conditions would America find itself in if the changes brought about by the national revolution in Asia had allowed the General Staff to forge military alliances and install air-naval bases in territories relatively close to Russia’s Asian borders? Identical considerations could be made with regard to the Middle East, North Africa, and Latin America.

Each of the two imperialist rivals feared like death itself the excessive growth of the other; and former colonial peoples certainly took advantage of these mutual fears to achieve independence. To understand the state of hatred and fear into which imperialism had fallen, we must cast our minds back to the McCarthyist wave that swept the United States, to the trials that threw the ‘people’s democracies’ into terror, and above all to the horrific Korean War. The fact that the first military clash between Americans and Russians took place in Korea, even though the Russians did not participate in the conflict with their own troops, serves to prove that the ‘Cold War’ was provoked by the need to proceed to a new division of the world following the dissolution of the colonial empires. What are the causes that are bringing about its end?

In the previous article, we argued that the phase of open political and military rivalry that followed the wartime alliance between the United States and Russia, i.e. the danger designated by the term ‘Cold War’, arose from the enormous social and political upheaval caused by the anti-colonial revolution, which moreover is still ongoing within the immense geographical space comprising Asia, Africa, and Latin America. War, by now it should be clear to everyone, temporarily resolves the bloody problems of imperialism by transferring onto the military plane the irreconcilable economic conflicts that class exploitation, the inequality of the historical development of the various capitalist countries and the national rivalries that result from it inexorably accumulate.

But if twice capitalism has set the world to iron and fire, a social earthquake that has swept across the planet, uprooting and tearing down centuries-old bastions of reaction has for just as many times. It was in the first post-war period, indeed even during the first conflict, that the proletarian revolution exploded vigorously in Russia and Eastern Europe, smashing the reactionary empire of the Tsars; and if the communist revolution that broke out in Russia was unable to expand so far as to sweep away bourgeois Europe, this is due to the shameful betrayal of the social democratic parties which, at the decisive moment of the social crisis, sided with the capitalist enemy.

The Second World War, desired and provoked by international imperialism, not even it, even in the absence of a revolutionary movement of the proletariat, ended in a mere division of the world, in a new redistribution of imperialist predominance. An attempt was made, by the great hegemonic powers that emerged victorious from the conflict, to coagulate the social movement into a prefabricated mould. But the international idyll celebrated at the Yalta and Potsdam Conferences lasted only a few years.

However, it would be anti-dialectical to suppose that the ‘Cold War’ that followed arose from a ‘rethinking’ on the part of American politicians or, worse still, from a resumption of the methods of class struggle by the then ruling Stalinism. The ‘breakdown of the wartime alliance’ between America (and its Western satellites) and Russia certainly did not occur because, as the stupid Atlantic propaganda in past years claimed, American capitalism intended to remedy the ‘mistakes’ made by Roosevelt towards its Russian ally. American imperialism had already taken tentative steps in this direction, seizing the Philippines (1898) and igniting the ‘Cuban War’ (1897-98). But it is historically incontrovertible that it was only through Rooseveltism that the United States transformed from an economic power into an imperialist super-State, the centre of a sphere of political and military influence that encompasses the entire planet. What were the United States before the Pearl Harbour incident, which Roosevelt and his collaborators certainly did not provoke out of foolishness but deliberately? Not only did Rooseveltian policy, silencing isolationism, allow the United States to rise to the rank of leading imperialist power, giving the American armed forces control of Western Europe and absolute maritime hegemony, but it also founded its indispensable premises by reforming the American State. That eminently totalitarian structure, barely covered by a democratic-parliamentary mask, which today is the American State, is the work, as we all know, of the... leftward turn of the New Deal.

There is more. The idiotic fairy tale according to which Roosevelt was the victim of Stalin’s deceptions falls apart as soon as one considers that, in order to ingratiate itself with its American ally, Stalin’s government proceeded to the suppression of the Communist International. In truth, Roosevelt proved himself a merchant of extraordinary abilities when he managed to buy, for a few billion dollars, rivers of Russian blood and, as a bonus, the liquidation of what still remained of an organisation that had shaken the international bourgeoisie to its core. Nevertheless, there are big names in journalism who earn as much in one article as a worker earns in a month’s work, writing that the ‘Cold War’ was caused by... Roosevelt’s ‘mistakes’!

Equally false is that the ‘Cold War’ was provoked by a revolutionary revival of Russian ‘communism’. Rather, the opposite is true. The ‘Cold War’ has enormously favoured the degeneration of the communist parties linked to Moscow. Indeed, once they came into conflict with their former American ally, the Moscow government and the Russian Communist Party were careful not to take up the ‘outdated’ weapons of class struggle. Imitated slavishly by the enfoeffed communist parties, they threw themselves body and soul into the entirely bourgeois politics of alliances between States. Stalin’s goal, as long as he lived, was not the revolt of the working class against the American and European bourgeoisies, but the disintegration of the political and military coalition headed by the United States, to be achieved through the seduction of the national bourgeoisies. The policy of the communist parties, which tends to detach a part of the local bourgeoisie from the military and political alliances imposed by American imperialism, had no other meaning, and still has none today. This and nothing else is what the political programmes of the communist parties mean, which are based on the cornerstones of the ‘search for dialogue with progressive forces’, ‘opening up to the left’, and similar opportunist infamies.

As proof of what we maintain stands the bloody purges that fell upon the ‘people’s democracies’ after Tito’s betrayal (1948), the East Berlin uprising (1953), and the Hungarian insurrection (1956). All these social tragedies were not at all caused by the application of an anti-bourgeois revolutionary policy on the part of the communist parties linked to Moscow. On the contrary, they were the necessary result of the unprecedented exploitation of wage labour, justified by the requirements of megalomaniacal production plans, or fuelled by deadly nationalist rivalries, which only the suppression of national economies through revolutionary means can eliminate.

At the sunset of the ‘Cold War’, there is in the Eastern Bloc no more socialism, or less capitalism, than before. Nor can we say that the opportunist gangrene devouring the ‘communist’ parties has been stopped. Far from it. Despite the absence of a class that owns the means of production, the Russian economy is increasingly revealing its capitalist nature, i.e. wage-based and mercantile. On the other hand, and not by chance, never before has the ideology of the communist parties, which, under the pretext of preserving peace, openly praise the embrace of classes, appeared so rotten. Nevertheless, the communist press continues to repeat in every tone that the ‘Cold War’ was caused by the American decision to prevent the ‘construction of socialism’ in Russia and the people’s democracies. In reality, it is the Khrushchevites who are demolishing the last vestiges, not of socialism, but of State capitalism itself!

Proceeding by exclusion, discarding the biased interpretations of the origins of the ‘Cold War’ put forward by propagandists hired by the imperialist blocs, we arrive at the conclusion we had already mentioned. We could move on to the topic that concerns us most, the study of the causes that are determining the turning point in international politics defined by the term ‘détente’, but we have preferred, even at the cost of repeating fundamental concepts, to broaden the discussion somewhat. To accept the theses of our opponents, to explain the reasons for the ‘Cold War’ and ‘détente’ with motives internal to the opposing blocs – the supposed ‘construction of socialism’ in the East and anti-Rooseveltian reform in the West – would be tantamount not only to passively accepting a distortion of historical reality, but also to fuelling a pessimistic conception of imperialism. The whole world is under the iron heel of imperialism, under the threat of war. Who would deny it? But imperialism is not all-powerful.

The Second World War did not end, as we said at the beginning, in a mere division of the world, planned and implemented by the imperialist powers. The plan to divide the world, forged in Yalta and Potsdam, was soon to be blown up. The social magma was stirring again. In contrast to a Europe immobilised in the iron grip of military occupation, the other continents were beginning to boil. Your press can continue to spread the most absurd theories about the origins of the ‘Cold War’. We will continue to maintain that it was events such as the fall of Mukden to Mao Tse-tung in October 1948, the overthrow of the monarchy in Egypt, the revolt in Madagascar which cost tens of thousands of Malagasy lives, the revolt of the ‘Kikuyu’ in Kenya, the sedition of the Indonesian Chiang-kai-shek-ists, the independence movements in Morocco, Tunisia, and Black Africa, the revolt in Algeria, the end of the era of ferocious pro-American military dictatorships in Latin America, in short, the generalised, uncontainable movement of revolt by the poorest, most oppressed, and most starving populations of the world, which was to bring down the international order that had emerged from the agreements between the greatest imperialist powers. It was these upheavals, the full extent of which we cannot yet calculate, that led to the general crisis of imperialism in the world just emerging from the conflict, known as the ‘Cold War’, of which events such as the breakaway of Titoist Yugoslavia from the Eastern Bloc and the Berlin Blockade are to be considered secondary effects, not causes.

What is certain is that, in the twelve years since the fall of Mukden, the world has undergone immense turmoil. Before our very eyes, political structures that had stood for centuries have collapsed. In their place, dozens of new states have emerged, some small and without prospects, others vast and destined for unprecedented development. The world economy has been shaken. The former colonial powers have had to go through a deep crisis, which is still ongoing. The imperialist centres have had to develop new political strategies and forge new military alliances. Could all this have happened without upheaval in a class society and under the nation-state system? No, it could not. We can therefore understand the reasons behind the so-called Cold War.

It is certainly no coincidence that the emergence of ‘detente’ coincides with the end, we would say, of the eruptive phase of the anti-colonial revolution. Of course, the problem of liberation from colonialism is still unresolved for many countries, first among them Algeria. But it is clear that nothing can now stop the march forward of the ‘coloured peoples’. No one doubts that Africa will soon be completely ‘decolonised’, like Asia.

But, just as it would be simplistic to reduce the causes of the ‘Cold War’ to the crisis provoked by the anti-colonial revolution – no one would accuse us of ignoring the permanent causes of conflict that underlie the capitalist economy and the nation-State, which are so bitter and deadly, especially in old Europe. It would be inadequate and one-sided to explain the subsequent ‘détente’ solely by the new phase of the same anti-colonial revolution.

There are many different events that have led to this turning point in world politics. Let us say right away that, in using the term ‘shift’, we are rejecting any gradualist bias. We have summarised our thoughts on détente in the title of this article. ‘Détente’ is the recent manifestation of the capitalist crisis. It does not in any way provide a solution to the crisis of capitalism, which is ineradicable. Internationalist communists are well aware that capitalism constantly generates contradictions and social cataclysms, which cannot be resolved by reformist measures. Above all, ‘détente’ is not an alternative to war. The only irreplaceable alternative to war are revolution and proletarian dictatorship. Capitalism itself is war, war of the bourgeois ruling class against the working classes. The war of armies is but a form of the social war that the capitalist bourgeoisie wages with all means to seize the labour power of the working classes and keep them enslaved under the heel of exploitation. The very word ‘peace’ is in stark contrast to reality. Under capitalism, peace never reigns. A world at peace is yet to come: and it will be the world without classes. ‘Détente’ is the new form assumed by the capitalist crisis.

It would be unreasonable to attempt a comprehensive list of the causes behind this détente. However, we can examine those that seem to us to be fundamental:

1. Readjustment of the world balance following the formation of new Afro-Asian states and the upheavals in Latin America, phenomena which brought to an end a period of profound political and social upheaval.
2. Exhaustion of the extreme phase of Russian degeneration which, under Khrushchevism, has burned through all the stages, so that Russia today appears, from a socio-economic, political, and ideological point of view, completely ‘Westernised’.
3. General crisis of American imperialism.
4. Worsening of European capitalist anarchy, accompanied by the threatening resurgence of nationalism and of the traditional continental hegemonic rivalries, and leading, within the Atlantic Pact military bloc itself, to the formation of rival trade blocs such as the EEC and EFTA.
5. Technical revolution in armaments, which has put an end to the external invulnerability of the United States and makes it necessary to draw up appropriate reforms of the structure of the war industries and the armed forces of the states themselves.

In the two previous articles, we have sought to identify, wanting to make ourselves aware of determining causes of the shift of the so-called détente, the objective factors of the Cold War. Our assumption is that the ‘Cold War’ represented, or rather made evident, the irrepressible crisis of capitalist imperialism, which remained unresolved despite the massscre of the Second World War. But we argue that ‘détente’ is also an aspect of the permanent crisis of capitalism, a new way in which the ineradicable contradictions of bourgeois society present themselves. The ‘Cold War’ arose from a generalised social and political upheaval which, in the immediate post-war period and in the years that followed, had as its theatre the less developed countries and the immense colonial empires owned by the imperialist powers of Western Europe. The Afro-Asian revolution, accompanied by anti-imperialist movements in Latin America, forced the imperialist powers that emerged victorious from the war – above all the United States and Stalinist Russia – to reconsider the plans for the division of the world adopted at Yalta and Potsdam in 1945. The treaties signed in those venues were aimed at a world which, at least as far as Asia, Africa, and much of America itself were concerned, began to change radically as soon as the Russian and American armies met in the heart of Hitler’s Germany.

The social and political earthquake produced by the anti-colonial revolution – which abolished the semi-feudal structures left standing by colonialism in former colonies, while profoundly altering the international balance by creating numerous independent states – was bound to be for the United States and Russia, war allies and custodians of the new post-war order, a source of serious discord. The colonial empires were now enormous and sterile appendages for the metropolises – Great Britain like Holland, France like Belgium and Portugal – which the war had ruined economically and reduced to a position of second and third rank. But it was difficult for Stalin’s Russia to imagine to what degree of productive, military, and political supremacy the United States would have achieved, if American imperialism, already overflowing with capital in search of investment, had succeeded in linking the vast empty spaces that the anti-colonial revolution was opening up to industrialisation to the metropolitan production machine. And how could the American imperialists not foresee that the expansion of the economic and political influence of their ally-rival Russia, following the birth of the new national-democratic regimes in Asia and Africa and anti-US upheavals in Latin America, would favour the growth of Russian power?

The Cold War did not arise from the ‘second thoughts’ of American politicians eager to remedy Roosevelt’s ‘mistakes’, nor from the supposed ‘return’ of Stalin and ‘Moscow communism’ to revolutionary class struggle, but from the turmoil produced in Russo-American relations by the dissolution of the colonial empires, which decreed the irrevocable end of old colonialist Europe, introduced into the international jungle new states with different and often conflicting origins and interests, and entailed a profound revision (and hence the internal struggles within the blocs, such as McCarthyism in America and the anti-Titoist repression in the ‘people’s democracies’) of the political strategy of the opposing imperialisms.

Should we conclude that the bourgeois world, having arrived at the ‘détente’, has thereby succeeded in overcoming a profound crisis? It is certain that the ‘Cold War’ represented a profound crisis of capitalism, and if it did not have revolutionary outcomes, this occurred because a true international communist party founded on the revolutionary principles of Marxism was lacking. But ‘détente’, while it heals one crisis, another, deeper, and more incurable one opens. It is indeed more realistic to affirm that ‘détente’ presents itself as the incubator of the future universal crisis of bourgeois society, and this will again pose to the exploited masses of the whole world the dilemma: revolution or world war. Yes, not the ‘Cold War’, but precisely ‘détente’, prepares the world war.

As long as they were rivals, the United States and Russia worked fiercely to limit each other’s development. As ‘peaceful coexisters’, they will be able, assuming they succeed in reaching agreements to the detriment of the smaller powers, to further enhance their economic and military power, to grow immeasurably, to expand ever more their respective spheres of influence, and thicken with ever tighter meshes the network of foreign trade. But you don’t have to be a Marxist to know that war between States stems from power imbalances. ‘Peaceful competition’, which is supposed to ensure world peace, will, on the contrary, only favour the great powers, deepening the gulf that divides them from the small ones. It will cause the United States, Russia, and the powers launched into the industrial revolution, such as China, to grow even more. But it will increase the difficulties of the declining powers: Great Britain, France, Germany, and Japan. War between States is permanently generated by the unequal development of capitalism on a global scale. Beneath hypocritical humanitarian and pacifist formulas, Russo-American ‘détente’ tends precisely to develop the capitalist powers unequally.

This is why it is so important to study the causes of the ‘détente’. In the previous article, we grouped them into five groups; let us now discuss them in a less schematic manner. Naturally, we cannot claim to have exhausted the subject. To discuss the causes of the détente means to review all world politics, because the ‘détente’ is a global phenomenon.

1) Exhaustion of the ‘eruptive’ phase of the anti-colonial revolution: here is the group of events that we have placed at the top of our list. It does not take much to convince the reader that between 1948, the year that the bourgeois sets as the beginning of the ‘Cold War’, and 1959, there is the same difference, to use a comparison, as between the eruptive and quiescent phases of a volcano. In our case, the volcano is represented by the anti-colonial revolution that erupted (in fact, as early as 1945) in Asia and Africa.

At the moment of Eisenhower’s announcement of the resumption of direct contacts with Moscow, inaugurated by Nixon’s trips to Russia (summer 1959) and of Khrushchev’s to America, Asia had long since concluded its great battle for independence, colonialism having remained clinging only to isolated possessions such as Singapore, Hong Kong, Goa, and Formosa. The Russo-Chinese alliance, the rival coalition of SEATO, the Nippo-American treaty, and the neutralism of countries such as India, Indonesia, Burma, Cambodia, Ceylon, etc., were and still are proof that a new balance of forces had been reached on that continent. Readers remember the struggles through which the imperialist powers found a balance in Asia: the Korean War, the Indochina War, the Malaysian partisan war, the Formosa War, and the Indonesian civil war.

In recent years, the Middle East, an oil-rich region and, above all, a bridge between Africa and Asia, has been a very serious problem. With its well-known arms supplies to Egypt, Russia was entering the region, where the failure of Franco-British-Israeli aggression against Egypt (1956) marked the end of European influence. With the military occupation of Lebanon and Jordan (1958), the United States threatened to succeed the old masters unchallenged. But the Iraqi national-democratic revolution, which had unwittingly provided American imperialism with a pretext for intervening in the Middle East, came to destroy the patient work of Anglo-American diplomacy that had been the Baghdad Pact. Everyone knows that this military alliance aimed to unite the states of western and south-western Asia bordering the USSR (Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan) with the purpose of keeping Russian influence out of the Middle East. With the removal of the Hashemite monarchy in Iraq, traditionally tied to British imperialism, and the establishment of a democratic republic, the anti-Russian coalition began to crumble, given that the new government in Baghdad immediately turned towards Moscow. Such a decisive turn of events had the effect of calming the waters of that stormy political sea: a clear sign that each of the imperialist rivals felt it had succeeded in counterbalancing the influence of the others.

Analogous considerations suggest the conditions in Africa at the time of the launch of the ‘détente’. Here, the Russo-American conflict did not take open and unequivocal forms because the presence of European colonialism prevented the United States from playing with its cards on the table. American imperialism longs to extend its financial and political protectorate over the nations struggling to shake off colonial domination, but at the same time it must take care to mend the cracks that emerge in the structure of the Atlantic Pact, of which the European colonialist states are important members. Russia enjoys greater freedom of manoeuvre and, in recent years, has not let any favourable opportunity escape, if today it provides ‘concrete and selfless aid’ both to Egypt for the construction of the Aswan Dam, and to Sudan, Ethiopia, and Guinea, and has offered some to the other independent African states at the second session of the UN Economic Commission for Africa (January 1960).

What is certain is that the national-democratic revolution in Africa has made great steps. Today, eleven independent states exist: UAR-Egypt, Ethiopia (with Eritrea), Ghana, Guinea, Liberia, Libya, Cameroon, Morocco, Sudan, Tunisia, and the South African Union. By the end of this year, Nigeria, Somalia, and the Belgian Congo will gain independence. Bearing in mind that all these states and possessions in the process of emancipation account for more than half of the African population (approximately 136 million out of 224,577,000), it is clear that the anti-colonial revolution can be said to be near victory. Naturally, the chapter of social convulsions through which the struggle against colonialism manifests has by no means closed, as demonstrated by the ignoble deeds of racist extremism by white settlers in Algeria, South Africa, Rhodesia, and Kenya. But what is important for us to point out, for the specific topic we are dealing with, is that even for Africa, as for Asia, the era of great political upheavals that coincided with the ‘Cold War’ is now a thing of the past. The old balance founded on the cornerstones of the colonial empires is being replaced by a new balance, founded on the independent nation-States.

For Latin America too, the ‘Cold War’ period coincided with a series of upheavals that entailed serious risks for American imperialism and, at times, an actual decrease in its influence. It is not necessary to reiterate that the thesis according to which the alleged Russian ‘infiltration’ provoked a widespread national-democratic revolt against American imperialism, which succeeded England, France, Belgium, and Germany in their financial dominance over the Latin American peoples, is false. It is true, however, that the unprecedented exploitation by American monopolies has produced in recent years the well-known anti-American movements ranging from the 1954 Guatemala war to the recent Castroist revolt in Cuba.

Naturally, Russian imperialism did not miss any opportunity to intervene in the affairs of the Latin American republics. The fact that communism tied to Moscow functioned not as a factor of the proletarian revolution, but as a collaborator of the local ‘national’ bourgeoisie under the slogans of the anti-fascist front, could certainly not reassure the United States. Washington reproaches Moscow not so much for leading the world communist revolution, but only (even if White House politicians speak otherwise) for hindering the expansionism of the dollar.

What is certain is that, in recent years, American imperialism has seen the gains made since the end of the conflict in Latin America under threat. One by one, the military dictatorships that ensured the continuity of US capital domination have had to give way to democratic regimes, supported by movements of clear anti-American tone. Often the transition occurred violently, as with the ousting of the filthy tyrants Jimenez from Venezuela and Batista from Cuba.

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In summary, the end of the ‘Cold War’ has coincided with the reorganisation of the world balance, profoundly disrupted by the revolutionary processes that put an end to capitalist colonialism – the most obscene form of colonialism in history – and culminated in the foundation of the new Afro-Asian independent states. Another cause of disruption of the world balance – that is, of the raw and naked relationship between the material forces of the imperialist powers – were, in the same period, the seismic shocks that swept through the social and political world of Latin America. But what influence will these geopolitical areas, which today appear reorganised but are prey to the industrialising obsession, exert in the future? The world is already too small for the pirates of international finance. What will happen when other productive giants rise due to the accelerated industrialisation of the former colonial or semi-colonial areas, today raised to the rank of independent states? We will then see what the much-vaunted ‘détente’ is made of...

In the next article, we will illustrate other aspects of the ‘causes of the détente’ currently underway.

2) The second group of events that led to the ‘détente’ includes the changes that have taken place in recent years within Khrushchevite Russia and the states that stand politically alongside it.

At the beginning of this article, the ridiculous theory was dismantled according to which Russia’s rapprochement with the West can be explained by the panic that the progress of Chinese industrialisation is causing among Moscow’s leaders. It is the incurable teleological mentality that produces such idiocies. One must be blind not to see that the policy of the powers, small or great and even very great ones, obeys an iron determinism that mocks the ‘will’ and intentions of ‘statesmen’. Certainly, as a result of the industrialisation at a forced pace that the Chinese ‘communist’ regime is carrying out, China will become the leading Asian power within a few decades. All the conditions are in place for such a prediction to become reality: the immense territory, the boundless population, the mineral deposits and, what above all counts, the gust of revolutionary spirit that animates the popular masses. Another objective condition deserves mention: the deeply rooted collectivist traditions of an extremely ancient people whom the millennial struggle against the gigantic upheavals of nature (especially the river floods) has accustomed to mass labour. After all, China has always been, throughout the centuries, the greatest Asiatic power. If, after a hundred years of eclipse, it should come under the ‘communist’ regime to regain the place that the Celestial Empire occupied among the Asiatic and world powers, only the unwary will be surprised by it.

Of course, the Russian leaders are well aware that in the not too distant future they will have to reckon with the reborn Chinese power. This falls within the political dialectic of States based on the nation. Why should we be surprised? Is it perhaps not the case that the Western Atlantic bloc is undermined by the irreconcilable nationalist contradictions that pit member states against each other?

A more realistic prediction is that the Russo-American ‘détente’ could translate, as far as the Far East is concerned, into a normalisation of Sino-American relations. It should not be forgotten that the tendency towards expansion in China is a ‘constant’ of American imperialist policy. Indeed, the ‘Chinese question’ conditions all American policy in the Pacific, and therefore constitutes for the United States a question of primary importance. There is more. American intervention in the ‘Chinese question’ marks, more than the war in Cuba and the conquest of the Philippines (1898), the true birth act of the world policy of the United States. Such a significance is encapsulated, in our opinion, in President Theodore Roosevelt’s mediation in the peace negotiations of autumn 1905 between the Japanese and Russian governments, at the conclusion of the lightning war that saw the Tsarist Empire succumb under the blows of the armies of the Mikado. The peace treaty was in fact signed at Portsmouth (USA) on 5 September 1905 and ratified in Washington on 25 November.

This does not mean so much that the United States intervened in the rivalries between Tsarist Russia and England of that time, without whose help the military fortunes of the Japanese would certainly have suffered a serious blow, but rather that the nascent American imperialism was clarifying for itself the objectives set by its own historical development and which would later be achieved: hegemony in the Pacific, the neutralisation of Japanese power, and the colonisation of China. This trend took shape in the wake of the events that followed the Chinese anti-monarchical revolution and, above all, at the time of the annexation of Manchuria by the Japanese, who in 1931 proclaimed the founding of the puppet state of Manchukuo, effectively a Japanese possession. It is certain that the Sino-Japanese conflict, which broke out in 1937, saw full American support for Chinese arms: the United States, although formally at peace with Tokyo, supplied Chiang Kai-shek’s government with all kinds of aid, not excluding air formations led by ‘volunteers’.

The military victory over Japan in the atomic summer of 1945 seemed to fully realise American hegemonic plans in the Pacific, but immediately after the end of the world conflict, the Chinese civil war, which had been going on since 1927, put the whole stake back into play. The regime of Chiang Kai-shek, which in the intentions of US imperialists was supposed to function as a vehicle for American expansion, began to falter. The rest is history. When, in February 1950, Si-chang, the Kuomintang’s last base on the mainland, fell and Chiang was forced to take refuge in Formosa, the American dream of the conquest of China could already, for at least two years, be said to have vanished.

This does not mean that American imperialism has given up on China. The immense Chinese space still remains a coveted prey for dollar imperialism, supplying the Chinese market is a golden dream for ‘Yankee’ financiers. Whoever fails to understand that the dismantling of Japanese military power and the occupation of the metropolitan islands of the Empire of the Rising Sun were aimed above all at the conquest of China shows that they have not understood the reasons behind the Nippo-American war. For American capitalism, Japanese production represents, given its competitive capacities, a danger or at least a serious disturbance. The Chinese market, hungry for industrial goods, represents something completely different for American exports.

Well, if until now the United States has had to resign itself to the cessation of all commercial and financial relations with China – the American trade embargo against China is reminiscent of the fable of the fox and the grapes, never mind stories about ‘international morality’! – this occurred precisely as a result of the ‘Cold War’. Now all the big names in Western journalism appear to forget that the most serious tension that occurred in the history of relations between the United States and China came about during the height of the ‘Cold War’. Did the Korean War, which saw Chinese ‘volunteers’ drive American troops back to the Fusan bridgehead, not break out in the summer of 1950 and drag on until the summer of 1953? And was it not in August 1953 that the Chinese attack began on the island of Quemoy, held, together with Formosa and the Pescadores, by Chiang Kai-shek’s mercenaries? And was it not in January 1955 that the American government proclaimed its decision to defend these islands by force?

It is clear, then, that following the ‘Cold War’, the ‘détente’ will inevitably lead to a rapprochement – whether diplomatic first and then commercial, or vice versa, it matters little – between the United States and China. And what will all this mean? Clearly, China will finally emerge from the partial isolation in which it finds itself today. And then it is not difficult to predict that such a change will benefit the development, in every sense, of Chinese power. Indeed, it will happen that not only Russia, but also the United States, you can be sure of that, will be happy to... help China.

In other words, it is precisely the ‘economic competition’ between the United States and Russia, under whose sign the ‘détente’ is being enacted, that will benefit Chinese power. One would therefore have to be an incurable idiot to uphold the thesis according to which (see all the entire Atlantic Western press) Russia tends to draw closer to the West out of fear of China.

But if the Russians’ fear of China is a fairy tale, Russia’s rapprochement with the capitalist West is an undeniable fact. It is necessary to explain it. And in order to succeed at it, we must examine the social upheavals that Khrushchev’s reformist policies have caused within Soviet Russia. Then it will be understood that, among the causes of the Russo-American rapprochement, the phenomenon of the galloping ‘Westernisation’ of Russian society in the Nikita Khrushchev era figures prominently.

We do not need to provide proof of our anti-Stalinism. Ever since Stalin’s tyranny was a fact, and not yet a memory as it is today, the Italian communist left fought, heedless of the secular excommunications of the Kremlin, against the monstrous degenerations caused by Stalinism in the doctrine and politics of the communist parties. We certainly cannot summarise here our fundamental critical refutations of the false economic and political theories spread by Stalinism to cover its betrayal perpetrated to the detriment of the communist revolution and the world proletariat. Readers are familiar with the ‘Dialogue with Stalin’ and the ‘Dialogue with the Dead’, which are as important in the struggle against Stalinist degeneration as the writings of Lenin and Trotsky were in the struggle against social democratic opportunism. For having had the courage to openly challenge Stalinism at a time when events such as the 19th Congress of the Russian Communist Party, the Congress of ‘de-Stalinisation’, were still in the realm of utopia, our party can today calmly assert that the Stalinist degeneration was not yet the final phase of more than thirty years of Russian degeneration, which was to be followed by the Khrushchevite phase, and that we cannot yet see the bottom that will be reached when the leaders of Moscow openly break with Marxism. This does not mean that we consider Stalinism preferable to Khrushchevism, but only that we consider Khrushchevism to be a degenerate phenomenon worse than Stalinism.

Some scientists support the theory of the expansion of the universe, according to which celestial bodies are moving away from each other at fantastic speeds. Such a theory would be better applied to the study of Russian society. Yes, Russian society is expanding! In every sense: industrial, military, commercial, technical, etc. But it is expanding by moving away at ever-increasing speed from the political and social core of communism established by the Socialist Revolution of October 1917. It is undeniably an expansion, but one that takes place in a retrograde direction compared to the communism of the glorious soviets of Petrograd and Kronstadt. Khrushchev’s Russia is straining with all its might, not to destroy the filthy bourgeois world that survives its putrefaction in the West, but to imitate it. And how could it be otherwise? Only those who strive for the same goal can compete, not those who pursue different goals. How could capitalism, which tends to preserve the bourgeois world, and communism, which tends to destroy it, ‘compete’? If facts such as the introduction of instalment sales, which under capitalism is nothing but the enslavement of the consumer and the reaffirmation of the capitalist monopoly of the means of production, are hailed in Khrushchev’s Russia as ‘steps forward’, it is clear that Russia is still expanding within capitalism.

But Russia’s rapprochement with the West, the massive ‘Westernisation’ of Russian society, is denounced not so much by the reforms introduced by Khrushchevism in the management of the means of production (decentralisation of company management, abolition of state machine and tractor stations and transfer of machinery to the kolkhozy, expansion of domestic and foreign trade, etc.), as much as by the political attitude of the Kremlin leaders, the orientation of the intellectual class, and the evolution of customs. From all the facts of daily life in Russian society, which the ‘communist’ press has been happy to report for some time now, one draws the distressing certainty that Soviet society, far from having reached the stage of transition from socialism to communism – as shabby Khrushchevite propaganda claims, without convincing anyone anymore – is becoming widely infected with Westernism, or rather Americanism. If the Stalinist five-year plans introduced into the backward Russian social body the hell of wage labour and mass production, the spurious economic liberalism of the Khrushchevites has completed the unmistakable picture of capitalist society, translating into social terms the consequences of capitalist industrialism established and carried forward, with typically bourgeois methods, by Stalinism.

Russia today is socially closer to the bourgeois-capitalist model than it was at the time of Stalin’s death. By now, searching for original features in the Russian social structure that cannot be traced back in the body of the old bourgeois societies of the West has become a vain undertaking. The liquidation of the Molotovist opposition, which inherited the residual anti-Western traditions of Stalinism, removed every obstacle to Khrushchevite policy in 1957. Since then, Khrushchevism represents in the contemporary history of Russia what the scion who inherits the fortune fiercely accumulated by his parent represents in family life. Stalinism destroyed the Bolshevism that had carried out the October Revolution, and bourgeoisified Russia by hiding behind the industrial achievements of the five-year plans, which had the certain effect of transforming a large part of the Russian population into wage workers. However, it still employed a pseudo-revolutionary phraseology that masked its theoretical and political degeneration. Nor did it hesitate to measure itself, albeit indirectly, against the United States on the military front.

With ‘de-Stalinisation’, Khrushchevism rejected the least degenerate part of Stalinism – hostility towards the West, which remains the bulwark of bourgeois conservation and counter-revolution. But it must be recognised that Khrushchevism had no other path to follow, on pain of squandering the substance of Stalinism’s legacy. An inevitable consequence of high industrialism, based on wages and therefore capitalist, fuelled by five-year plans, tested by world war and definitively triumphant in the military victory achieved by Russia, was the conquest of an adequate place in the world market. The other capitalist industrialism is no different. Indeed, an essential characteristic of every capitalist economy is the tendency to free commercial traffic from the fetters of localism.

What makes Khrushchevite Russia socially closer to the bourgeois-capitalist model, when compared to Stalinist Russia, is precisely the ‘world consciousness’ of the Russian leaders. If one studies the formation of the capitalist powers of the West, one finds that the national bourgeoisie, at a certain point in its evolution, discovers such a consciousness within itself. At the same time, the ruling bourgeois class mitigates the drastic methods of labour exploitation hitherto ruthlessly employed (see England at the time of the Chartist movement) and grants liberal-democratic regimes. Such a transition occurs in the period in which the construction of the industrial machine is now complete, a layer of the ‘labour aristocracy’ has emerged from the working masses, the middle class has sheepishly allowed itself to be organised by big capital, and the state bureaucracy has had plenty of time to transform itself into an immovable caste. Therefore, all this has basically repeated itself in Russia, before our eyes. No other difference is historically possible to grasp between Stalinism and Khrushchevism.

The policy of ‘détente’ and ‘peaceful competition’ represents for Khrushchevism the only possible way to capitalise on the Stalinist legacy. Therefore, those who tend to see a contradiction between Khrushchevism and Stalinism are profoundly mistaken. To notice it, it is enough to take a look at the statistics and observe which and how much progress has been made, under Khrushchev, by the policy of foreign investments euphemistically labelled ‘aid’; how the USSR’s foreign trade network has become denser; how, in a word, Moscow’s sphere of economic influence has expanded.

Russia’s rapprochement with the West is not shown by the physical contact of national flags, which, with festoons and garlands, frame the theatrical meetings between Russian and Western ‘leaderships’. All this is choreography. The real substance of the rapprochement with the West lies in the unstoppable maturation, within Russian society, of phenomena typical of the domination of finance capital, which is the basis of imperialism. What makes Khrushchevism more repugnant than Stalinism is precisely the fact that the international policy of the Russian state no longer relies solely on the brute force of arms, but on the power of Money. Russia is becoming under Khrushchev a centre of world finance: here is the decisive fact that unites the so-called ‘country of socialism’ with the bourgeois powers. One must have a stomach completely resistant to nausea to digest the pseudo-theories that make a state, treated by other states as a creditor to debtor, nothing less than the driving centre of the anti-capitalist revolution!

But it is precisely this businesslike attitude of the Russian state that induces the great pirates of international capitalism to negotiate with it, in spite of the horrifying label of ‘communism’. In Washington, Khrushchev did not meet with adversaries, but with colleagues; in the worst case, with competitors. The same will happen to Eisenhower, when he visits Russia.

Let us take stock. If it had depended on the will of the Russians, the ‘Cold War’ would never have broken out. It was not Moscow, but the anti-colonial revolution that shook the world immediately after the Second World War. The ‘détente’ today coincides with a period of settlement for the countries born from the decomposition of colonialism and the re-establishment of the world balance. It, on the other hand, responds to the needs of expansion of Russian influence in the world and to the need for international normality on the part of the new Afro-Asian states, for which international tension entails serious risks (as was already seen at the time of the failed Franco-Anglo-Israeli expedition against Egypt), while hindering the realisation of their industrialisation plans. We must now illustrate the other powerful objective factors that are at the origin of the ‘détente’: the general crisis of American imperialism, the rifts within the Atlantic alliance, and the technical revolution brought about by the introduction of tele-weapons.

3) General crisis of American imperialism: with these terms we have indicated the third group of events (after the end of the anti-colonialist explosion and at the beginning of the great political and social rapprochement of the USSR with the USA) which must be analysed in order to discover the causes of the ‘Cold War’ and, consequently, of the ‘détente’ that followed it.

To understand American imperialism, as with any historical phenomenon, it is necessary to retrace its steps and trace it back to its origins. Naturally, this is not a mere chronological exercise. On the contrary, a critical examination of the material constituted by the events is necessary in order to sift out the common characteristics that the history of American capitalist imperialism shares with that of other world imperialisms, as well as its original and exclusive characteristics. Anticipating the conclusions, it can be asserted that the fundamental trait of American imperialism is an extreme instability, a condition of permanent crisis and desperate struggle against the mortal dangers inherent in the global convulsions that it itself foments.

The essence of American imperialism is financial colonisation. In the broadest sense, colonialism is the subjugation of a lower-level socio-economic structure by a political power based on a more advanced socio-economic structure. Capitalist colonialism, which began at the time of the geographical discoveries, had in common with classical colonialism (Phoenician, Greek, Roman) the material occupation of the territory to be subjected to exploitation. In fact, it happened that entire continents were subjected to the capitalist form of production, and its transplantation onto the old local structures, which in not a few cases had remained stuck at primitive communism, was carried out with methods of extreme cruelty that characterised the ‘conquistadores’. In other words, capitalist colonisation, in order to carry out its gigantic raids on labour, had to proceed to the occupation of overseas territories. For no other reason, masses of men, who for the capitalist entrepreneur represented nothing more than reservoirs of labour to be drained to the last drop, were thrown into the grip of colonialism.

Historical development shows that American imperialism did not follow the traditional paths of colonialism. Naturally, this does not prove that American capitalists were repulsed by the methods used by their European or Japanese colleagues. On the contrary, there came a period at the end of the last century that saw the flag of the dollar republic planted on overseas territories conquered by force, as demonstrated by the war against Spain, which yielded to the United States possession of the Philippines. That the American bourgeoisie inherited from the anti-English revolution of the late 18th century a moral aversion to all forms of colonialism is pure ideological legend, which not even the Atlantic journalists, who prattle about it every day, believe. The truth is that, precisely through the work of the American bourgeoisie, hypocritical and more bigoted than ever, capitalist colonisation reached its genuine form, that is, one that was one hundred per cent bourgeois.

All things considered, the old colonialism, which on other occasions we have defined as ‘historical’ colonialism, came to be too costly. To establish a colonial regime in overseas territories meant, until the First World War – followed shortly after the last great venture of old colonialism, the French conquest of Morocco (1912) – setting up a state apparatus of coercion that forced the indigenous people to abandon their old forms of local production and allow themselves to be enslaved in the prison of wage labour. In short, the exclusively capitalist aim of capturing enormous masses of people to be transformed into wage slaves was pursued by means that capitalist colonisation shared with that of other historical periods: occupation of territory, immigration into it of a portion of the metropolitan population, and the construction of a local bureaucratic apparatus.

This type of capitalist colonialism perpetuated itself for a long time through all sorts of acts of abuse and villainy. Suffice it to recall the slave trade, which cost Africa, both from the massacres carried out by slavers and from the economic consequences, as many as 200 million lives, as the Senegalese poet Leopold Senghor, leader of the Federation of Mali, recalled in Rome at a conference of African intellectuals. But it still contained, perhaps precisely because it was mitigated by elements not exclusive to capitalism, a certain degree of humanity. In the end, the white settlers who swarmed like locusts behind conquering armies or settled in the colony after having driven out the indigenous people exposed themselves, if nothing else, to the hardships associated with the change of climate. If the indigenous people, specimens of ‘inferior’ races, had to pay for the benefits of ‘civilisation’ with their blood, the lords were asked, at least, to sacrifice their sweat. But this type of colonialism began, in the decades at the turn of the century, to no longer align with the trends of the new historical capitalist phase, namely imperialism. The irresistible advance of finance capital rendered the old patterns of ‘historical’ colonialism obsolete. A new form of capitalist domination began to take shape: the subjugation of weaker economies by financial powers through debt.

The first imperialist war of 1914-18 was the testing ground for the two opposing tendencies within international capitalism. The colonial empires appeared to emerge strengthened from the first world slaughter. The ruins of the Ottoman Empire – territory now belonging to Syria, Iraq, Palestine, and Arabia – went to enlarge, in the form of ‘mandates’, the already gigantic colonial booty of the Entente powers. But a fact of enormous importance emerged from the war catastrophe: the possessors of colonies all turned out to be heavily indebted to the United States. What had happened? The colonisers had been colonised! American financial power, the only one in the world that declared itself anti-colonialist, had begun the big hunt, proceeding first of all to reduce the most advanced capitalist states of Europe to its own financial colonies!

So much for American anti-colonialism! So much for the legacy of the American liberal revolution! It was not the ‘moral conscience’ of the American bourgeoisie, but historical determinism, which had forced the Entente powers to become wartime clients of US production, allowed the dollar imperialists to repudiate the old forms of economic domination previously used by the European colonial powers. The use of such methods had not allowed the American bourgeoisie to go beyond the annexation of the Philippines: the gates of access to Latin America and Asia nevertheless remained firmly barred, fiercely guarded by rival pirates. A little less than 10 years before the outbreak of the world war, was not Theodore Roosevelt’s America forced to act as a mere intermediary in the conflict that broke out between Japan (supported by England) and Russia over the possession of the Manchurian railways and of Port Arthur? But in 1918, the United States were the creditors of the world’s major powers.

What did this mean? An entire era was collapsing, one that had seen capitalist domination rely on the systems of historical colonialism and the division of the world into enormous empires. A new form of domination was emerging, financial domination, which bypassed borders, subjugating weaker economies no longer with the weight of military occupation, but with the invisible noose of debt. The rounding up of workers to be thrown into the mechanism of exploitation, which the old colonialists pursued in the colonial countries with the aid of the slave trader and of the overseer, could now be done in the civilised countries themselves by indebting local governments, forcing them to act as intermediaries for the banks of the imperialist super-state that lent the capital and demanded interest on it.

This was exactly what was happening: advanced countries such as Germany were reduced to financial colonies that were allowed to produce and live on condition that they allowed themselves to be fleeced by usury across the border.

This form of domination, which is a true super-colonialism, fell precisely to the sanctimonious America of the Theodore Roosevelts and Woodrow Wilsons to introduce into the history, already full of infamies, of capitalism. To those congenital ‘anti-colonialists’ fell the glorious task of purifying capitalist colonialism of all spurious elements, of purging it one hundred per cent, and of applying its new methods, no longer only to backward countries, but to all the states of the world. In this way, finance capital saw an endless hunting ground open up before it, the rapid realisation of accumulations of profits that the antiquated systems of historical colonialism did not allow. It was the triumph of the new historical phase of capitalism. But the old empires based on colonies were factors of conservation of the first order, formidable bulwarks of the counter-revolution. Therefore, the rise of the imperialist primacy of the United States coincided with the dawn of an epoch of great revolutionary convulsions, of which the Russian Socialist Revolution in 1917 gave the signal.

At the Congress of the Communist International in the summer of 1920, Lenin sketches a picture of the situation to which it is useful to refer, insofar as from it clearly emerges the phenomenon of the explosion, thanks to the world war, of American imperialism. To Lenin, while events were still in a state of incandescence, what only today is beginning to enter into the bourgeois minds already appears clearly: the end of England’s imperialist primacy in favour of the United States, the regression of bourgeois Europe, proprietary, entrepreneurial, and commercial, before banker and financial America. Lenin lists the states which, in the light of Marxist critique, appear as the true victors of the first imperialist conflict, placing in first place not England, which in 1914 was the hegemonic power, but the United States, the newcomers in the imperialist jungle. And in second place is Japan, the great profiteer of the wars provoked in Asia by European imperialism.

The key to the mystery of this transformation lies in the fact that, as was to repeat itself during the Second World War, the United States had become the ‘arsenal of democracies’. But it did not limit itself to manufacturing weapons of mass destruction and selling them to the belligerents. In addition to being a weapons factory, the free star-spangled republic served as a supply depot for the armies at war. Europe had hungered for weapons with which to fuel the slaughter, and for provisions to sustain its armies. But millions of men had been torn from factories and fields and thrown into the trenches, so that the forces of the ‘home front’ were not enough to bring production up to the level of urgent needs of the General Staffs. So Europe became a client of the United States, placed colossal orders on the American market and asked to obtain sales on credit from those who, until shortly before, had been its debtor. In fact, until 1914, the United States was in debt to various European countries, most of all to Great Britain.

Thus, while the war was bleeding the European nations dry, the American economy made a gigantic leap. Not only industry, whose products the new European customers, but agriculture itself was entering a golden age. Industrial plants underwent a profound transformation in both technical and management terms, while European industries were marking time. Agriculture made equally great strides: industrial crops were increased; large areas of uncultivated land were cleared and brought under cultivation; rivers of industrial products and foodstuffs poured from the Atlantic shores of the United States to Europe, where the great furnace of war swallowed up the riches that had been acquired but not paid for. The balance of debts was postponed until the end of hostilities. Thus, while the European economy languished, the American production machine raced ahead frantically. The race continued uninterrupted until the tragic year of 1929, when the United States fell into the abyss of crisis, dragging Europe and the rest of the world with it.

But immediately after the war, who would dare to predict the crisis? The United States appeared to be the invincible bulwark of capitalism, overflowing with wealth, courted and flattered by all the governments of the world, which, in order to ingratiate themselves with the big banks that now boasted credits with everyone, showed themselves to be bowing to Wilson’s pacifist fantasies. But what conditions did the rest of the world find itself in?

Lenin’s words clearly reveal the social pyramid that existed in the aftermath of the First World War, with 1.75 billion people making up the world’s population at the time. The United States, with 100 million inhabitants, Japan with 50 million, and England – ‘which, after these two countries, gained most from the war’ – with 50 million, and the neutral states that enriched themselves through the slaughter, formed a population of 250 million people. Of course, this human mass cannot be considered undifferentiated, being divided into social classes. However, it forms the field of the real profiteers of the massacre.

The base of the pyramid, the multitude staggering under the weight of social oppression, is represented by 1.25 billion people living in colonies or countries ‘in the process of being divided up’, such as Persia, Turkey, and China. The populations of defeated countries or countries reduced to colonies also belong to this group. There remain 250 million men living in countries that remained in their pre-war position but fell under American economic and military influence. In total, there are 250 million in the camp of the victors and 1.5 billion in the camp of the vanquished, the oppressed, and those subject to colonial rule.

What strikes us most of all and denounces the radical turn taken by capitalism is the completely unprecedented fact that imperialist war, and with it the domination of finance capital, reduces not only semi-civilised countries to colonial status, but even the most advanced nations of the world. ‘War’, says Lenin, ‘has suddenly thrown some 250 million people back into a situation equivalent to that of a colony. It has thrown back Russia, with its 130 million inhabitants, Austria-Hungary, Germany, Bulgaria, with no less than 120 million inhabitants. Two hundred and fifty million men belonging in part to countries such as Germany, which are among the most civilised, most advanced, most cultured, and which, from a technical point of view, are on a par with modern progress. The war, through the Treaty of Versailles, imposed conditions on these advanced peoples that plunged them into a situation of colonial subjugation, misery, hunger, ruin, and lack of rights, since the treaty chained them for many generations and reduced them to living in conditions in which no civilised people had ever lived’.

Here is the true face of capitalist super-colonialism, born of the first imperialist war and personified by the United States: colonial subjugation extended to civilised peoples; colonising peoples transformed into colonised peoples no less than the inhabitants of the colonies. And at the top of the bloody pyramid, three imperialist super-states: the United States, Japan, and England. But in the same pirate triad, above all the powers of the world and above England or Japan themselves, stands the financial power of the United States, the plutocratic monster which, exploiting the carnage, has bound the major states of the world to its chariot. They are chained for many generations, Lenin warns, and never has a prophecy proved more accurate. Lenin did not need to witness the unfolding of events to understand that American peace, the peace of the usurers, imposed by the Treaty of Versailles, would weigh heavily on the shoulders of future generations, causing tremendous catastrophes. We are familiar with the grim chain of infamies that began with the social earthquake that caused the economic crisis of 1929-30; the advent of Nazism in Germany, the war in Ethiopia, the war in Spain, the Sino-Japanese war, Hitler’s attacks on Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, and finally, the second world carnage.

Imperialist super-colonialism produced its dialectical complement: super-nationalism, the political pathology of fascism and Nazism, which did not shy away from employing methods once used by slave traders in the colonies, such as trafficking, forced deportation and the mass murder of prisoners, in the heart of progressive Europe.

But let’s continue. It is worth pausing to consider the economic crisis of 1929-31, which had its epicentre in the United States but affected almost every country in the world. The crisis erupted due to changes that occurred in the financial and commercial relations between the Old and New Worlds following European economic reconstruction. By studying the causes and consequences of that great international upheaval, it may be easier to analyse the causes of the current political phenomenon: the ‘detente’ between the United States and Russia.

At the end of the first imperialist war, all the major states are in debt: ‘only the United States comes to find itself in an absolutely independent position’. Even England, which holds huge credits with France, Italy, and Russia, is indebted to the United States for the astronomical sum of 21 billion gold pounds. Together with Great Britain, they are creditors to France to the tune of 26 and a half billion; together with England and France, to Italy to the tune of 20 and a half billion. If one considers that all these powers, so indebted to the United States, were the heads of immense colonial empires and controlled, through their banking organisations, the greater part of the inhabited world, one realises how the USA, in the aftermath of the first imperialist war, was already taking decisive steps on the road to world hegemony, later conquered through the second slaughter.

Another consideration must be made. Only in the second post-war period have we witnessed the collapse of the old colonialism. But, clearly, its condemnation had been written in the events of First World War, at the moment when the American banks saw the major colonial powers of old Europe rush to their counters. Revolutions never happen before the old social structure that needs to be demolished has rotted away due to its internal contradictions. In this sense, the great upheavals that led to the expulsion of the colonialists from Asia should be considered events of revolutionary scope. Following Lenin’s classic reasoning, the revolutionary conditions for the overthrow of colonialism existed: on the one hand, the consciousness of the exploited masses that they could not continue to live as before and their firm will to change their condition; on the other hand, the consciousness of the exploiters that they could not continue to rule as before.

But it is equally clear that the disintegration of the colonial empires saw the subversive drive of the masses, oppressed by an intolerable yoke, coincide with the historical aims of American imperialism, to which was joined, in the position of rival, Russian imperialism. Knowing this has prevented us from falling into the opportunist horror of mistaking the content and aims of the anti-colonialist revolutions for something other than the demo-national revolution, or even for socialism.

In order to fully understand the causes of the world economic crisis and its consequences, we need to linger on the particular situation into which the Treaty of Versailles had left Germany. The victors had imposed on the vanquished to pay the so-called ‘war reparations’, i.e. to compensate the victors for the damages ‘suffered’ in a war whose responsibility it was decided, by the Wilsons, Lloyd Georges, Clemenceaus, and Orlandos, should be attributed exclusively to Germany and its allies. But the very provisions of the treaty placed Germany in the impossibility of restoring its productive apparatus, shattered by the war and plundered by the victors.

Then, like a deus ex machina, the financial genius of American bankers intervened, giving birth to an idea compatible only with bourgeois usurious madness: to allow Germany to pay the war reparations, that is to say, an enormous debt, by forcing it to accept a loan intended to set national production back in motion. Nothing could be more exquisitely bourgeois! You owe me a loan and you don’t earn enough to pay me back? Don’t worry: I’ll advance you an additional sum that you can use to exploit a greater number of workers, and thus will allow you to repay the old loan and the new one, plus interest on both. After all, the all-powerful banker, from atop his pile of billions and surrounded by the scientists of bourgeois economics, behaves in exactly the same way as the neighbourhood loan shark to which world literature has accustomed us.

On 11 April 1924, the Reparations Commission adopts the plan drawn up by the North-American General Charles P. Dawes, a trusted figure in American finance and a skilled financier himself. Germany, which would receive a loan of 800 million gold marks for the economic reconstruction of the country, undertook to pay one billion marks in the first year; within four years, the instalment would rise to two and a half billion. The Reichsbank was considered responsible for the payments. But how would it find the necessary funds?

The launching of the Dawes Plan caused a real storm throughout the German political spectrum. The most violent protests and the most atrocious threats came from the hotbed of far-right parties, movements, and associations, among which was Hitler’s National Socialist Party, notoriously financed by landowners, industrialists, and bankers, and supported by the never-dissolved cadres of the former imperial army. This would suggest that the blow dealt by Anglo-American finance (since the British and, above all, the Americans were the bankers providing the loan) was directed at the German bourgeoisie: far from it. Wolves do not eat wolves. The furious xenophobic and revanchist campaign of the extreme right was pure demagogy. In reality, it was the German working masses that Mr Dawes intended to bleed dry so that the Reichsbank could meet its commitments. Indeed, it was established that the funds necessary to pay the instalments should be raised through the levying of taxes on transport, tobacco, alcohol, beer, and sugar. In addition, foreign creditors assumed control of the railways, which were taken away from the state and organised into a private company; the customs service and the Reichsbank itself suffered the same fate. And if an American financier had been the creator of the Plan, the post of inspector general for its execution was entrusted to another American financier, Parker Gilbert.

In the previous article, for the illustration of one of the aspects of the historical course that has led to the end of the ‘Cold War’ – the internal crisis of American imperialism – the history of US hegemony over the world during and immediately after the First Imperialist War was briefly retraced.

Lenin’s prophetic words! American financiers, who hypocritically professed the religion of isolationism and rejected Wilson’s idea according to which the USA should have assumed leadership in the League of Nations, not only managed to invest their accumulated capital magnificently by speculating on the slaughter, they also obtained the reduction of Germany to a semi-colony. The Dawes Plan drastically reduced the sovereignty of the state and placed the economic direction of the country in the hands of the men of Wall Street. That the deal succeeded is proven by the fact that Germany, having managed to restore its production machine, was able to pay the gigantic tributes until the outbreak of the 1929 crisis and even managed to pay the reparations. A true colony of the New York Stock Exchange, it soon became a haven for international finance. In 1928, it was 25 billion dollars in foreign debt!

The Young Plan, named after another American financier, was launched shortly before the crisis broke out on Wall Street, in the spring of 1929. It replaced the Dawes Plan, and its objectives were to fix the total debt owed by Germany for reparations, which had remained undetermined until then, and to remove foreign controls over the German economy. The entire sum was divided into 52 annual instalments, averaging 2,050 million marks per year! In terms of hypocrisy, the Young Plan was an improvement on the Dawes Plan: foreign controllers left Germany, the railways and the Reichsbank returned to the hands of the state, and the Entente undertook to evacuate the Rhineland, which took place in 1930. It seemed that Germany returned to being its own master. In reality, more enslaved than ever, it was obliged to pay the annual instalments provided for in the Plan until 1988. Nor could it refuse to submit to dispossession, since by then the German economy breathed in the atmosphere of foreign loans, i.e. Anglo-Saxon, and more American than British.

Indeed, when American financiers, struck by the crisis, hastily withdrew their capital invested abroad, and Germany no longer received foreign money, a terrible economic catastrophe struck the country. Industry was seized by paralysis. Multitudes of unemployed people were thrown onto the streets: 3 and a half million in 1929-30, and as many as 6 million in 1931. The devastating hurricane, with its epicentre in the metropolis of world finance, reached the European states with lightning speed, and the backlash was incomparably more deadly in the countries that, like Germany, had been reduced to the level of a colony.

But what circumstances had caused the crisis in the United States? The same ones that, during the war and post-war years, had favoured the elephantine growth of American production, namely the close financial and commercial ties established between Europe and America. But this time, the situation turns against America.

The story of the crisis of 1929-31 has a tragic and comic flavour at the same time, as, after all, all the follies of capitalist mercantilism. In the aftermath of the war, American capitalism had not stopped in its course: industrial production, agricultural production, profits, investments, and sales were all on the rise. The country overflowed with capital that presented itself as loans both domestically and, as we have seen, abroad. In 1928, the trade balance recorded an extraordinary surplus: exports exceeded imports by a value of 800 million dollars. In 1929, steel production had reached the level of 50 million tonnes annually. 5 million automobiles roamed through the streets of the Union! Foreign loans reached the astronomical figure of 1 billion and 126 million dollars. 1928 dollars!

Well then, that enormous mass of money causes the crisis. While the turmoil of instalment sales, credit openings, and speculation keeps production costs high, causing inflationary phenomena, far more serious events are maturing abroad.

Fertilised by the torrential rain of dollars, the shattered European economies recover. Production reaches and exceeds pre-war levels, the broken threads of foreign trade are reconnected, but no one is forgetting that the interest on American loans must be paid. Hence the tendency to reduce imports from America, so that debt does not grow even further. Indeed, American imports would end up damaging the agriculture and industry of European countries, which the American loans themselves had put back on their feet; therefore, efforts are made to erect barriers of state controls on foreign trade, of protectionism. The great flood of American exports begins to ebb. First to be rejected... and returned to sender are agricultural products, whose surpluses begin to pile up in warehouses. From the countryside, traditionally the area of least resistance in the capitalist economy, the crisis spreads to industry. Automobile factories, steelworks, construction sites, and workshops close down.

The catastrophe erupts when the disease attacks the heart of the American economy: finance, the plutocratic empire of large private banks, public credit institutions, and the Stock Exchange. When these powers, seized by panic, decide to pull in their boats, demanding repayment, both at home and abroad, the crisis spreads to the whole world. But who is able to return the capital from languishing enterprises? We have already seen the case of Germany. But no country in Europe, and one may say in the world, escapes the earthquake: England, France, Italy. Even Soviet Russia, which, according to false Stalinist theory, was supposed to build socialism within the enclosure of its borders, suffers very serious losses in foreign trade and is forced to reintroduce ration cards!...

The political consequences of the global economic crisis immediately appear tragic. Two events of extreme importance took place, certainly not by chance, during the period of the great crisis; indeed, we can say that they are directly determined by it. First, the practical annexation of Manchuria by Japan, which, breaking the deadlock, proceeds to detach the coveted region from China, barely disguising its act of oppression with the proclamation of a phantom independent state, Manchukuo. This happens on 18 September 1932, but already in the closing part of the summer of the previous year, the Tokyo Government had its armies occupy much of Manchuria. Since the end of the First World War, Japan had coveted Chinese territories, claiming Shantung, a former German possession. If Japanese capitalism now decides upon the great step, even knowing that it would bring upon itself the hostility of the Anglo-Saxon powers, this happens because the world economic crisis has seized Japanese foreign trade by the throat. In the general retreat of governments into the trenches of protectionism, Japanese commodities see their markets of outlet shrink through the action of England, the ‘dominions’, and the United States itself. Add to this the fact that the Chinese government has recently proceeded with the construction of railway lines ‘parallel’ to the South Manchuria Railway, operated by the Japanese, and beginning from 1929-30, the new Chinese railways practice strong competition to the detriment of the Japanese lines and the port of Dairen.

The annexation of Manchuria leads to a bitter dispute between the League of Nations and Tokyo, which on 24 February 1933 withdraws spectacularly from the Geneva conference. Conversely, the United States, which is not part of the League, having refused to join since its foundation, throws itself into the diplomatic fray raging on Lake Geneva, showing an unexpected zeal in the staunch defence of the League’s rights against Japan. And this is very important. Indeed it is during this period that the Nippo-American antagonism arises, which will have an enormous influence on the course of events and will conclude with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the fateful summer of 1945.

The other event of world importance is the rise to power of the Nazi regime in Germany. The convenient history of cheap apologists, who claimed to explain the causes of the Second World War with the ‘demonic spirit’ of the German nation, will never be able to erase the fact that Nazism rose to power by exploiting two objective conditions: the desperation of the masses, which the paralysis of industries, already fuelled by the dollar, threw into misery and hunger; the betrayal of international Stalinism which, faced with the rising fascist tide, refused to call the working masses to revolutionary action, imprisoning them in the straitjacket of electoral competition.

If it is true that the aggressive actions of Nazi-Fascism in Europe and Japanese imperialist militarism in Asia lit the fuse of the second world conflagration, it is equally true that, from the point of view of preserving capitalism, both represented the only solutions to the irreparable instability caused by the economic crisis from across the Atlantic.

Well then, what happened yesterday helps us to understand what is happening today. The second post-war period largely reproduced the situation of the first. Once again, the United States gained from the war, enriched itself on the massacre, while the other belligerents are left heavily impoverished and in need of American loans. It is no longer possible, nor indeed necessary, to revive the shadows of the past, such as the Dawes Plan or the Young Plan. In fact, the American armed forces, unlike at the end of the First World War, practically garrison not only the territory of the defeated, but all of Western Europe. In other words, as a guarantee for the colossal loans they are about to grant to Europe, American bankers hold the very offices of the debtors in the palm of their hands.

The new mammoth financial operation binding European national economies to the American financial centre is once again named after a US general, George Marshall. On 16 April 1948, the ERP (European Recovery Program) becomes operational, the official designation of the Marshall Plan, with the signing of the sixteen participating states of the conventions that established the OEEC (Organisation for European Economic Cooperation), in turn dependent on the ECA (Economic Cooperation Administration), the body that administers the ‘aid’ granted by American banks to its sister Europe. The countries ‘benefiting’ from the new rain of dollars were: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Greece, Ireland, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, Norway, the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, and Turkey. In September of the same year, the ERP welcomes the Free Territory of Trieste under its protective umbrella and, the most coveted morsel of all, West Germany, which on 23 May of the following year would be constituted, at the behest of the Allies, as a Federal Republic.

As proof of the intimate friendship between dollars and guns, so well symbolised by the US general-financiers, the clients of the ERP, except for some advantageously replaced by Canada, signed the NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) on 4 April 1949. Participating were: Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, and the United States. The pact came into force in the same year, and in September 1951, Greece and Turkey joined; later, Federal Germany itself.

How should we interpret these events? The consequences of the financial cyclone of 1929 reinforced the so-called isolationism in the United States. It was nothing more than a reflection of the American bourgeoisie’s great fear of the collapse of the post-war boom and its awareness of the terrible dangers arising from the consequences of American financial expansion around the world. Subjugating foreign economies, through debt, represented an intoxicating business, generating masses of profits at a speed never seen before. But did it not deprive the American economy of the independence necessary to shield it from the convulsions of the world market?

In reality, American isolationism never went beyond the limbo of political ideologies. We have seen how, in the midst of crisis, the United States committed itself fully to Asian policy, rising up against Japanese annexations in Manchuria, while the European Powers, England included, reacted with words alone at meetings of the League of Nations. Now, the direct participation of the United States in a series of intercontinental coalitions (after NATO, it was the turn of ANZUS and SEATO), within which the Washington government assumed leadership roles (an absolutely new fact, considering that the United States had refused in the post-war period to join the League of Nations), can be considered as the component of two forces, which are at the root of the permanent crisis of American imperialism: the irrepressible drive of finance capital towards foreign investment and the tendency of the bourgeoisie to safeguard its own class existence and that of international capitalism by strengthening the American bulwark.

The Marshall Plan and the Atlantic Pact aimed to expand the sphere of influence of American finance capital by creating the preconditions for massive investment, and at the same time preventing centrifugal movements from arising among the client states. Now, in light of the facts, it is clear that the American attempt to carry out the economic reconstruction of Europe in such a way as to make the economy of the ‘assisted’ countries complementary to the American one has certainly failed. The injections of American dollars have undoubtedly enabled England, France, the Benelux countries, Italy and, above all, Germany and Japan, to climb out of the post-war economic abyss.

Naturally, this did not happen without benefits for American financiers. But, just as on the eve of the 1929 crisis, the European economic reconstruction has not led to the strengthening of Euro-American relations, but rather to a situation of crisis. And once again, the American economy has suffered severe setbacks, albeit not comparable to the catastrophe of 1929. Suffice it to recall the ‘recession’ that struck American industry on the eve of the Korean War. Currently, the situation is much more serious, since the countries that in 1948 gave life to the OEEC, and, in the intentions of US capitalists, were supposed to constitute the economic complement to America, are divided into opposing trade blocs, and even German and Japanese competition once again begins to disrupt US trade. As for the US economic situation, this newspaper has repeatedly provided an overview. It is no coincidence, therefore, that the ‘détente’ coincides with a period of serious American economic difficulties. We are certainly not at a crisis, nor even at a ‘recession’, but the horizon is undoubtedly darkened.

At this point, a historical comparison comes to mind. This is not the first time, in fact, that a Russo-American rapprochement occurs in a situation of discomfort for Yankee imperialism. The United States, as is well known, always refused to recognise ‘de jure’ Soviet Russia and remained the only power, among the major capitalist states in the world, that did not maintain diplomatic relations with Moscow until the autumn of 1933. Was it a coincidence that this happened while, as a result of the economic crisis, ultra-nationalist reaction was exploding in Europe, Germany was slipping out of the hands of American bankers, and all the European states, clients of American banks, rushed to lock themselves up in the bunkers of anti-American protectionism, and while the Nippo-American controversy in the Pacific was breaking out? Certainly not. It is a fact that the Russo-American friendship, which would later turn into a wartime alliance, was born at a time when the ‘anti-plutocratic crusade’, i.e. the movement opposing Anglo-Saxon financial hegemony, was taking shape in Europe and Asia, led by the bourgeoisies most tested by the war.

Even today, under the banner of ‘détente’, Russo-American rapprochement is taking place while the states of Western Europe, the former beneficiaries of the Marshall Plan, the current members of NATO, are showing clear signs of impatience toward American hegemony. We will discuss the anti-American nationalist sedition in the next article. Here it will suffice to allude to facts such as De Gaulle’s rise to power in France, the trade split that pits England against France-Germany, and forces the United States into a dangerous policy of compromise, and the revival of the German imperialist spirit (today comes the revelation of the plans of the German General Staff aiming to provide Germany with military bases in Spain, in open competition with the United States, to which at the proper time the Madrid government had precisely granted such a privilege!).

Naturally, it goes without saying that Russia and America both benefit from this ‘detente’, since if American imperialism were forced by resurgent European nationalism to relinquish its interests on the Old Continent, the justifications for the presence of Russian troops beyond the Elbe would cease to exist.

Concluding today’s argument, it can be argued that to powerfully promote the political shift whereby America and Russia lay down the weapons of the ‘Cold War’ is, beyond the evolution that took place in the former colonies, today presenting itself as a market capable of absorbing surplus capital from industrialised countries, and beyond the increasingly Westernising changes imposed on the Moscow government by the unbridled commercialisation of the Russian economy, the recurrence of the classic crisis situation of American imperialism.