Miguel Ángel | Unión Proletaria
On the European continent, NATO is escalating its indirect aggression against the Russian Federation along the road leading to direct war. The European Union has chosen to align itself with the United States, rather than develop mutually advantageous relations with Russia.
Historically, eastward expansion has been a necessity for European imperialism, particularly German imperialism, when the conquest of other continents becomes difficult. However, at present, it has been the US that has pushed for confrontation with Russia, installing neo-colonial anti-Russian regimes in East Central Europe and blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines that transported Russian gas directly to the Western European powers.
The prevalence of U.S. interests in the countries of the European Union originated with the Anglo-American victory on the Western front in World War II and was underpinned by the subsequent installation of military bases and submission to NATO and the European Union. This was masterfully analyzed in the Report presented by A. Zhdanov to the Kominform in 1947.
The revisionist turn in the USSR and its Eastern European allies and the final implosion of these socialist states reinforced the Americanization of the continent, which was resisted only by the Republic of Belarus and, later, by the Russian Federation.
On the other hand, at the end of World War II, the capitalists of Western Europe were forced to make broad concessions to the working population in order to counteract the strength of the workers’ movement and the sympathy it felt for the socialism being built on the other side of the “Iron Curtain”.
But the structural crisis that began in the 1970s forced capitalism to undertake a growing process of neoliberal counter-reforms whose implementation was facilitated by the revisionist degeneration of many communist parties, encouraged by Khrushchev’s “New Course”. Each stage of this process increased the economic advantage of the United States over the European Union, triggering a flight of capital from the old continent. This is the current case, following the sanctions against Russia, the interruption of the direct supply of its gas, the increase in the prices of this and other raw materials and the growth of expenditure for the purchase of armaments.
Within the European bourgeoisies, the financial oligarchies are the ones who most willingly accept these impositions of Washington, because the type of investments they make―largely in money-capital―allows them to relocate them to North America, improving their profitability; and, in general, they are highly dependent on the economic, monetary, political and military strength of the United States.
On the other hand, the middle industrial and agrarian bourgeoisie see their profit expectations harmed, which ends up having negative repercussions on the employment and living conditions of the majority of wage earners. Therefore, contradictions grow within the bourgeoisies of the old continent between its monopolist and non-monopolist sectors, strengthening in the latter the tendency towards protectionism and nationalism in the face of the globalism and cosmopolitanism of the USA and the European communitarian bureaucracy.
The oligarchic sectors seek to defuse this objective conflict by channeling popular discontent against apparent external enemies: Russia, China and the other truly independent States, and also the population emigrating to Europe because of the imperialist exploitation of their countries of origin. In this way they foment national hostility among the workers in order to weaken their trade union resistance and revolutionary action as a class.
The growth of the right-wing and ultra-right parties in the last elections held―in particular, those for the European Parliament on June 9―is not really due to the objective need of the peoples to defend their sovereignty, but to their systematic manipulation by the dominant ideological media. The nationalism of those political parties is pure demagogy so that the masses will bring them to power, from where they will reinforce even more the imperialist oppression of them. Such was the case of the fascist General Franco who imposed himself in the Spanish Civil War boasting of being “national”, while he sold our country to Germany and Italy; and, when these powers were defeated, he handed it over to the government of the United States.
However, the demand for sovereignty in the face of imperialism is not reactionary but democratic. There can be no democracy where the people lack sovereignty. And only by fighting for it, together with the other democratic demands, will we be able to advance towards socialism.
In conclusion, also in today’s Europe, we communists―who are the most consistent anti-imperialists―must remember the last advice addressed to us by comrade Stalin:
“Now the bourgeoisie sell the rights and independence of their nation for dollars. The banner of national independence and national sovereignty has been thrown overboard. Without doubt, you, the representatives of the communist and democratic parties must raise this banner and carry it forward if you want to be patriots of your countries, if you want to be the leading powers of the nation. There is nobody else to raise it.”
Let us learn to execute this recommendation, without giving an inch in the struggle for the political independence of the proletariat and for the reconstruction of its Communist Party and its mass class movement. Only in this way will the peoples of Europe be able to contribute to the defeat of imperialism and the victory of peace, democracy and socialism.