Miguel Ángel | Unión Proletariá (Spain)
Article for the Session 3:
New Cold War and Internationalism (Imperialism’s New Cold War Machinations and the revolutionary strategy of the international communist movement)
The more the crisis of the imperialist system deepens, the greater the conflicts between the United States, Europe, and Japan with the rest of the world and among themselves, seeing war as a way to save themselves at the expense of others, subjugating and plundering them. They are accelerating the already growing exploitation of their workers to finance war preparations. To convince the working class to acquiesce, they bombard it with lying and hysterical propaganda pointing to Iran, China, and Russia as threats to peace, security, and the Western way of life. It matters little that this propaganda is contrary to reason and evidence:
• The BRICS+ countries, harassed by imperialism, do not need to conquer the wealth of others because they already have sufficient natural and human resources within their own territories to develop the most thriving productive economies on the planet;
• Only the continuous provocations from Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan and South Korea are forcing them to make a military effort, even though it is much smaller than that of the Western powers;
• It is these, suffocated by an over-accumulation of capital and debt, that have to resort to parasitism and piracy.
Although emerging countries are taking advantage of their current advantages to resist, imperialist harassment is causing them serious damage. The communist, pacifist, and democratic forces of the West are trying to counter this aggression by refuting the war propaganda of capitalist governments and private media. Their propaganda reaches a much larger population, but ours can be more powerful provided it is truthful and corresponds to the fundamental interests of the working majority. Hence the need for communists to demarcate camps with our allies in the anti-imperialist struggle, denouncing their errors and illusions, rather than repeating them.
It is true that anti-imperialist propaganda must take into account the current consciousness of the working majority, shaped by decades of economic, political, and ideological domination by the bourgeoisie. But we communists cannot start from this false consciousness as the petty-bourgeois democrats of the so-called “left” do. As materialists, our starting point must be the objective needs of our class and of social development. The task of communists must consist precisely in instilling an awareness of these objective needs in the workers and organizing them to satisfy them. And we will not be able to achieve this unless we criticize the subjectivist errors of our fellow travelers.
The first mistake is to accept the Russian leaders’ interpretation of the new Cold War in which we are immersed: they attribute it to the Western elites’ eternal hatred of Russia, concealing its connection to the anti-communist Cold War of the 20th century. While claiming that Tsarist Russia was a powerful country coveted by other powers, they deny its backwardness and reactionary nature, thus denigrating Lenin and the Bolsheviks, without whose socialist revolution the USSR would have been unable to defeat Nazi-fascist imperialism and contain “democratic” imperialism.
But Western leaders, in their current campaign against Russia, are not dedicated to denouncing its imperial past, but rather to completely erasing the memory of the decisive Soviet contribution to the victory over Nazism. This fact demonstrates that the current Cold War is a continuation of the one unleashed by the imperialists after World War II. If they attack communism as even more totalitarian than fascism, it is because they fear—more than nuclear annihilation—the recovery of socialist ideals among the population of the former Soviet Union as the war against Russia intensifies.
Therefore, we communists must support the Russian government’s resistance to imperialist harassment, but we must also criticize its bourgeois and anti-communist orientations, which endanger it.
A second error to avoid is propagating the idea that the West is increasing arms spending for economic, not military, purposes: that is, to restore capitalist profitability at the expense of workers’ incomes. This belief ignores the reality of imperialism and its objective tendency toward war. By covering up the danger of world war with a softer but deceptive alternative, it undermines the revolutionary preparedness of the working class, legitimizing the subjectivist thesis of modern revisionism (20th Congress of the CPSU, 1956), according to which imperialism would have been forced to renounce world war because of nuclear weapons.
There is a third error, complementary to the previous one, which is the most serious of all because it disarms the proletariat. We are referring to the one committed by those who consider the main task of communists to be uniting, organizing, and mobilizing the masses on a more or less sentimental pacifist basis.
The modern revisionism that decomposed the international communist movement consisted precisely in the abandonment of preparing the proletariat for revolution and its replacement with the preaching of a peaceful and parliamentary path to socialism, of peaceful coexistence and emulation between different social regimes, and of the political organization of the entire people, without distinction of class.
What led us to this quagmire was the imperialist prosperity achieved after two world wars, at the cost of the neocolonization of the oppressed peoples and the destruction wrought on the USSR. But today, this prosperity is turning into its opposite, and capitalism is dragging us full speed ahead into a third world war, barely held back by the fear of mutual nuclear destruction. Given the present conditions and prospects, it has become even more opportunistic and criminal to settle for defensive propaganda that whines against the folly or immorality of the imperialists, thus unwittingly helping them keep the people frightened and powerless.
It is all very well to advocate anti-imperialist unity as the primary immediate objective, but we communists—especially in the imperialist countries—can only achieve the strength of the proletariat’s unity by educating and organizing within the Communist Party the most conscious sector of our class most willing to fight for the overthrow of the bourgeois political regime.
It will be precisely the political clarity and practical example of this party that will elevate the combativeness of the average worker, as events permit. To think that one must begin at the opposite extreme, from below, along the line of least resistance, by accumulating resistance to the bosses, to the war, to the imperialists, in “a process of growth of the party’s tasks, which grow along with it,” is to succumb to the same spontaneity that Lenin refuted in his famous work What Is To Be Done?
This doesn’t mean that we should neglect, as a secondary concern, the concerns of the broadest masses, but it does oblige us to ensure that our propaganda and also our agitation are consistent with the necessary revolutionary path. Consequently, instead of preaching peace as a sine qua non for advancing toward socialism, we must explain that, on the contrary, only the struggle for socialism will bring peace because it will prevent the Third Imperialist World War or because it will allow its defeat by transforming it into a revolutionary civil war.
Furthermore, the restoration of political independence by the proletariat of the imperialist countries will be the best way to help our class brothers and sisters in those oppressed countries that are emerging as powers, in the face of the chauvinist aspirations of their bourgeoisies.
Shortly before his death, Stalin scientifically refuted the idyllic pacifism with which modern revisionism was beginning to emerge. In The Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR, he warned that:
• The post-World War II mass peace movement only pursues the goal of mobilizing the popular masses to prevent a new world war;
• On the other hand, the mass movement born out of the First World War pursued socialist ends by transforming the imperialist war into a civil war;
• therefore, the peace movement can postpone war and temporarily avoid a particular war, which is very good;
• but it cannot eliminate the danger of war because imperialism remains.
• To avoid war, “imperialism must be destroyed.”
Stalin was merely adhering to the Bolshevik Party program, into which Lenin had incorporated the objective laws of the new imperialist stage of capitalism. In Materials for the Revision of the Party Program, Lenin:
• exposes the fundamental peculiar features of imperialism: the high degree of development of world capitalism, the preparation of the apparatus of social regulation of the production and distribution process by the banks, the rise in the cost of living, the increase in the oppression of the working class by the monopolies (the tremendous obstacles to their economic and political struggles), the horrors, calamities, ruin and barbarism brought about by the imperialist war;
• deduces as a consequence that “all these factors transform the current stage of capitalist development into the era of the proletarian socialist revolution.”
• and concludes that the most urgent task is “the direct preparation, in all forms, of the proletariat for the conquest of political power, in order to implement the economic and political measures that are the essence of the socialist revolution.”
This is the approach and spirit that we communists must recover to combat imperialism and its war in a truly decisive manner!