Fodé Roland Diagne | Ferñent (Senegal)
The war in Ukraine, in the Sahel and the ongoing Zionist genocide in Palestine, followed by the extension of its aggression against Lebanon, as well as the tensions in peaceful Asia, are manifestations of the march of US imperialism, flanked by European, Israeli and Japanese imperialism, towards World War 3.
U.S. imperialism and its European, Israeli and Japanese vassals are clearly using economic liberalism, the repression of social resistance and fascism at home and war abroad to both maintain maximum profit for their capitalist monopolies and preserve their unilateral global hegemony.
Imperialism is the class dictatorship of the big bourgeoisie against workers and peoples. Fascization, fascism and war are illustrations of this inherent nature of capitalism at its supreme stage, whose foundations are the exploitation of workers, eco-pillage and the oppression of peoples through the limitless pursuit of maximum profit. These intrinsic characteristics are aggravated tenfold by the systemic crisis of overproduction and over-accumulation of imperialism, the supreme stage of capitalism.
Systemic Causes of the USA’s and EU’s New Colonial Wars
From its very inception, capitalism as a mode of production has been marked by what some today call “globalization”. Indeed, the social class behind this economic and social system, the bourgeoisie, was boosted in its quest for economic and political power by the discovery of mineral raw materials such as coal, metallic iron and gold, and agricultural raw materials such as wool, cotton and coffee, the exploitation of which required a workforce whose only possession was manual and/or intellectual labor: the working class, the proletariat. Thus was born the contradiction between capital/imperialism and oppressed peoples, alongside the contradiction between capital and proletariat. In other words, the colonial system through the brutal military conquest of the American continent, the genocide of the Amerindians―the first great crime against humanity of the modern era―and the mass emigration of European populations to populate the American continent, complemented by the slave trade and enslavement of black Africans.
From the 15th to the 19th centuries, the European subcontinent was a technological, industrial, financial, military, strategic and geopolitical power. It was in Europe that the raw materials plundered from America arrived, to be transformed into industrial products. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the second phase in the internationalization of capital, or the capitalist “need for space”, took place through the conquest of colonial empires. Europe, especially in its western part, soon followed by the USA, was the “workshop of the world”, transforming agricultural and mining raw materials into industrial consumer products. All the colonial wars of nascent capitalism, then of developing capitalism, and finally of mature capitalism, which divided up the world by conquering vast colonial empires, not to mention inter-imperialist world wars such as the 1914-1918 war for a new division of the world, have one characteristic: they were waged to seize sources of raw materials and slave or forced-labor in order to transform natural wealth into industrial goods in imperialist centers. The division of labor obeyed the following rule: Workers in imperialist countries were responsible for industrial transformation, while colonized peoples were responsible for mineral extraction and agricultural production.
However, the national liberation struggles of the 18th and early 19th centuries on the American continent, in the wake of the independence of the USA and Haiti, then those of the 20th century, spurred on and supported by the Bolshevik Revolution, the USSR and the socialist camp victorious over Nazism, gave rise to so-called “emerging” countries such as China, India, Brazil and Vietnam, as well as new revolutionary, progressive, anti-liberal experiments such as Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Honduras, which rely on the heroic economic, cultural, political and ideological resistance of socialist Cuba.
Having lost their exclusive monopoly on the transformation of industrial products and the production of the means of production, the new conditions for the realization of maximum profit give a special character to the new cycle of colonial wars of aggression waged by US imperialism and the EU against the peoples of the world.
The new cycle of imperialist wars is driven by the need for US/EU/Israel/Japan imperialism to control the sources of strategic raw materials essential to the development of “emerging countries”. The aim is to generate colossal profits by controlling the “emerging countries” and making them dependent on the imperialist powers for access to the raw materials they need to continue developing. Through their stranglehold on the strategic wealth of producer countries, the USA and the EU are setting themselves up as usury rentiers, determining the conditions of access to raw materials in “emerging countries”. The monopolies of the Dow Jones, the CAC40 or the Nikkei, etc. can thus speculate on prices, set taxes, impose conditions, organize the sabotage of economies or weaken them, wage trade wars and thus continue to exploit and dominate the world economy.
This is what makes it necessary for the imperialists of the USA and the EU to wage “low- or medium-intensity” wars against weak, underdeveloped countries, in order to enslave them. Such is the case with the two wars against Iraq, the war against the former Yugoslavia, those against Afghanistan, the Ivory Coast, Libya and Syria, against Russia and today against the countries of the ESA. The aim is to put an end to powers that refuse to submit to the diktat of the imperialists, who therefore, despite the bourgeois or feudal nature of their regimes, reject imperialist domination and sometimes even seek to develop their countries into independent “emerging” countries. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Milosevic’s Yugoslavia, Gaddafi’s Libya, Gbagbo’s Côte d’Ivoire, Assad’s Syria and the ESA of Goïta, Traoré and Thiani… are precisely the kind of countries where the money from oil and other national wealth, through the nationalization of production, refining and even the petrochemical industry, has endowed these countries with a human development index (hdi) that is nowhere to be found in countries subservient to EU and US imperialism. Better still, these countries have invested in economic, educational, health and social achievements that have lifted their people out of misery compared to the neo-colonies of the USA and EU, and are gradually putting them on the road to development. This is precisely what is being destroyed by the imperialist aggressors who, with bombs and missiles, are striving to bring these countries back to the “Stone Age”, only to seize the wealth of these countries through the iniquitous system of debt and profit for their private companies, on the pretext of supposedly “rebuilding” them. In addition, as in Iraq and Libya, to this massive destruction of infrastructure and economic and social achievements, this looting of historical works and this gluttonous predation on wealth, we must add the targeted assassinations of engineers, scientists, researchers and professors in the countries attacked by the imperialists in order to make them dependent for one or more generations. This is another reason why imperialism is barbarism and terrorist totalitarianism.
The “emerging countries” have become the new “workshop countries”, producing everything the planet consumes, in particular everything consumed by the EU and the USA, which are gradually “de-industrializing” under the leadership of “offshoring”, which partly determines the new international division of labor, to become even more than in the past “rentier countries, usurers living off fictitious capital”. This is a phenomenon described by Lenin as the tendency of usury parasitism and the putrefaction of imperialism.
This objective evolution of the international division of labor in the third phase of “globali-zation”, i.e. the internationalization of capital in the perpetual quest for maximum profit, is explained by Lenin himself: “Developing capitalism is experiencing two historical tendencies in the national question. The first: the awakening of national life and national movements, the struggle against all national oppression, the creation of national states. The second: the development and multiplication of relations of all kinds between nations; the destruction of national barriers, the creation of the international unity of capital, of economic life in general, of politics, of science and so on. These two trends constitute the universal law of capitalism. The first is dominant at the beginning of its development, the second characterizes capitalism that is already mature and moving towards its transformation into a socialist society.” (“Critical Notes on the National Question”, Œuvres, vol. 20, p. 20). While imperialist countries are characterized by the second trend, the dominated countries, including the “emerging” countries emerging from the underdevelopment imposed by colonialism and neo-colonialism, are at the stage of the first phase of capitalism as described here by Lenin.
This is why Lenin warns: “Imperialism has developed the productive forces to such an extent that mankind has only to pass over to socialism, or else endure for years and even decades the armed struggle of the great powers for the artificial maintenance of capitalism by means of colonies, monopolies, privileges and national oppressions of all kinds” (“Socialism and War”).
It is this decay of capitalism at its supreme stage, which has nothing left to offer workers and peoples but misery, fascism and war, that exacerbates the contradictions between capital and labor, between imperialism and oppressed peoples, signs that this predatory economic system is dying and must give way to socialism. Imperialism is the insoluble fundamental contradiction between the increasingly globalized socialization of production and the private monopolization of maximum profits by the shareholders of finance capital and monopolies. That’s why imperialism brings war with it.
USA and EU Program of World Domination
Hegemonic since 1945, like all dominant im-perialism at any period in history, the USA is attempting to impose an international division of labor according to its needs, to the detriment of its competitors and “emerging countries”. To achieve this, they need to perpetuate their monetary, military, cultural and political hegemony. To this end, the way out of the crisis envisaged by the US imperialists is “war save america”. The presidents of US finance capital are simply carrying out the clear demands of their true constituents, the military-industrial complex and US oil companies. BBL chief economist Peter Vanden Houte sums it up cynically: “Inhumane as it may sound: for the world economy, ‘a very small war’ would now be the best solution. A war with a ‘favorable’ outcome would mean lower oil prices and interest rates, and a boost to stock market prices” (AFP September 21, 2002). This is where we need to understand the major importance of raw materials in general, and particularly strategic ones such as oil, gas, uranium, coltan, gold and so on.
The ideologists and strategists of US imperialism began planning their strategy in the mid-80s, at the very moment when the counter-revolutionary liquidator Gorbachev began his policy of destroying the USSR and the socialist camp. Schultz, head of US diplomacy in 1985, noted that “we are prepared to dissuade the Soviets from waging all-out nuclear war or attacking our major allies, but it is not at all clear that we are as prepared and organized to prevent and counter the gray area of intermediate challenges we are most likely to face, namely low-intensity conflicts” (Le Monde Diplomatique, April 1991). The January 10, 1988 report of the US Commission on Long-Term Integrated Strategy, entitled “Selective Deterrence”, stated that “these low- and medium-intensity conflicts in the Third World are clearly less dangerous than any Soviet-American war, yet they have had and will have a cumulative negative effect on US access to critical regions” (idem). Henri Kissinger had already advocated that “in addition to our retaliatory nuclear force, we must therefore build up units that can intervene rapidly and make their power felt” (idem). Gaspar Weinberger, US Secretary of Defense at the time, concluded that “the high priority we have assigned to the Special Operations Force (SOF) reflects our sense that low-intensity conflict is the threat we are most likely to face in the years ahead” (idem). This, too, is the purpose of the membership of the countries of the former socialist camp in Eastern Europe in NATO, in addition to NATO’s rapprochement to the doorstep of Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), the weakening and dismantling of Russia and the encirclement of China.
Let’s go further back in time. It should be noted that a September 1950 memorandum from the U.S. State Department clearly illuminates the meaning of what is happening today through U.S. wars of aggression: “Control of that source of energy, oil, important in peace as in war is a desirable objective in itself (…). U.S. governments should strive to develop American (oil) concessions to the maximum” (Le Monde Diplomatique, April 1991). And David L. Boren, Senator and Chairman of the CIA’s Intelligence Committee, widened the scope of the US hegemonic strategy of the “new world order” born of the defeat of the USSR: “We have had a strange and symbiotic relationship with the USSR (…). The decline of the Soviet Union (…) could just as easily lead to the decline of the United States (…). European countries, Japan and others have readily accepted American leadership in past decades. Why did they do so? Because they needed us (…). Will they be willing, in this new context, to accept American leadership, as they did a few months ago? I don’t think so” (idem).
The White House no longer hesitates to openly threaten even its European and Japanese “allies” (in addition to Russia and China). In September 2002’s The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, it declared: “Our forces will be strong enough to deter any adversary who attempts to surpass, or even match, the military power of the United States” (1991). Dr. Peter Pham, advisor to the U.S. State and Defense Departments, puts it even more bluntly: “Among AFRICOM’s ultimate goals was to protect Africa’s rich access to hydrocarbons and other strategic resources, a task that included guarding against the vulnerability of these natural resources and ensuring that third parties such as China, India, Japan or Russia could not obtain a monopoly or preferential treatment” (quoted by F. William Engdahl, mondialisation.ca, September 27, 2011). He adds: “These natural resources and wealth make Africa an easy target for the attentions of the People’s Republic of China, whose dynamic economy… has an almost insatiable thirst for oil and the need for other natural resources. China currently imports approximately 2.6 million barrels of crude oil a day, with around half of this consumption, some 765,000 barrels a day, or around a third of its imports, coming from its African sources, especially Sudan, Angola and Congo (Brazzaville). Is it any wonder, then, that no region of the world other than Africa has rivaled China’s strategic interest in recent years? Intentionally or not, many analysts expect that Africa, specifically the states along its very rich west coast, will become the scene of strategic competition between the USA and its only real global rival, China, as both countries seek to extend their influence and secure access to resources” (idem). As we all know, these are the foundations of the military program to preserve US imperialism’s world domination.
This program requires the establishment of a Western “axis” with its allies in the EU powers, Israel and Japan, which also includes the feudal, medieval fundamentalist petro-dollar theocracies and their “jihado-terrorist proxies”. The alliance with fascist Islamists (who use religion for political ends, which has nothing to do with the vast majority of Muslims) is nothing new. This alliance with the terrorist networks of the “godless” al-Qaeda was forged against the secular, democratic Republic of Afghanistan, the Soviet army and communism.
USA and EU Are to the World What German and Japanese Fascism were to the World
In the 1930s, the Nazis set out on a program to crush the workers’ movement in Germany, too influenced for their taste by Communism, to destroy the USSR by means of total war in the name of “living space”, and to conquer world hegemony by seizing the territories of their other imperialist competitors as well as their colonial possessions.
The notable difference lies in the fact that the world hegemony of English capitalists in the 18th and 19th centuries was achieved through the conquest, annexation and exploitation of vast “colonial empires” in America, Asia, the Pacific and Africa. This hegemony consisted in carving out the lion’s share of the colonies to the detriment of other rivals―France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, etc.―and reducing the populations to slave labor to be exterminated through labor and massacres of those who resisted.
The fascist imperialists of the 20th century imported and applied the same methods, directly annexing the territories of other imperialist competitors in Europe as well as their colonies. The transformation of “inferior populations” (Slavs, Jews, Serbs, Gypsies) into slave labor to be exterminated when they are no longer needed should be seen in this context. Applying the recipes of colonial totalitarian barbarism to colonialist “lord states and nations” is at the root of the chauvinist “particularism” that differentiates between the savagery of fascists in Europe and that of colonialists in other parts of the world, while fuelling this sordid “memorial competition” between victims of the various genocides of capitalism in its colonial or fascist form.
Since 1945, the USA has led the capitalist world in defeating socialism in Europe and the USSR through the “containment of communism”, the “American way of life”, the use of ex-Nazis in the fight against real socialism, “low-intensity” wars like the one in Vietnam, the division of the international communist movement by Titism, then by revisionism and Eurocommunism, the corruption of communist parties in certain major imperialist countries, support for the bourgeois conciliatory and servile national movement in colonized countries, the repression of revolutionary national liberation movements and communists as in Indonesia, the destabilization of the European socialist camp with “dissidents”, the rise to power and gradual capitulation of the revisionists in the USSR and the European socialist camp.
This strategy of the US and its European and Japanese allies also involved concessions to workers’ and people’s struggles and national liberation struggles, which led to major social and democratic gains in the imperialist countries and national independence for the former colonies.
From the 1970s onwards, the general crisis of imperialist capitalism aggravated the structural crisis of overproduction and over-accumulation. The Bretton Woods institutions (IMF, World Bank), the GATT and later the WTO became the instruments of finance capital, dominated by Wall Street bosses, to cut off the countries of the South in the name of “Third World debt”, in the form of liberal structural adjustment plans and currency devaluations in South America, the Middle East and Africa. It was the triumph of a single liberal way of thinking, which had been tried and tested in the countries of the South in the form of liberal recipes, and was now being re-imported into the imperialist countries themselves under the now-famous “there is no alternative” formula.
The major turning point was the defeat of the socialist camp in Eastern Europe and the restoration of capitalism in the USSR, which the US ideologue Francis Fukuyama defined as “the end of history”, heralding “eternal capitalism”. Freed from the restraint of the socialist camp in Europe and the USSR, US and EU imperialism embarked on a vast liberal program to undermine the social and democratic gains made by workers in the previous period, and to wage colonial wars against the national democratic achievements of formerly colonized peoples, states and nations, accelerating the process of capital’s “re-globalization”.
Destroying socialist states and sovereign countries means opening up their markets to finance capital, thus providing outlets for the over-accumulation of profits.
However, the southern survivors of the defeat of the socialist camp, in which the national factor had been an important and decisive driving force behind popular revolutions, such as China, Vietnam, North Korea and Cuba, soon joined by ex-colonies such as capitalist India and the ALBA countries (Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, etc.), plus Russia, now capitalist once again, and South Africa, have kept out of submission to Western diktat. And on the basis of more or less anti-liberal policies, supported by state control of strategic economic levers, these countries have become “emerging countries” that are resisting and combating the global hegemony of the imperialist powers of North America, Europe and Japan.
Attracted by these countries’ “markets” and higher rates of profit, the capitalist monopolies have embarked on relocations, which the “emerging countries” are taking advantage of to catch up economically, industrially, technologically, scientifically, financially and militarily. This economic development is turning the geostrategic and geopolitical balance of power on its head, to the detriment of the US and EU imperialist powers. Hence their warlike hysteria, aimed at preserving and perpetuating their age-old hegemony.
US/EU imperialism is to the world today what German Nazism was to humanity after the October Revolution of 17 and the building of socialism in the USSR.
Back to Panafricanism and Internationalism
In the face of the imperialist war waged by the USA, its EU allies and their jihadist/terrorist proxies, the workers’ and progressive movements of the war-mongering powers are disarmed, and the peoples of the victim countries are suffering imperialist aggression. We have witnessed the capture of President Gbagbo in Côte d’Ivoire, Milosevic in the former Yugoslavia, and the assassinations of Saddam in Iraq and Gaddafi in Libya. The US, French, British, Israeli and Japanese imperialists have proclaimed themselves representatives of the “international community”. But allies too must submit to the role-sharing decided by the USA and carry out their demands, as shown by the apparent “vanguard” role in Libya of Cameron and Sarkozy, and of Hollande in Syria, with the resounding failure that we owe to Putin and the Communist Party of China.
This is a strategic upheaval of major scope and importance. Indeed, since 1991, the new cycle of colonial wars decided by the USA has only just come up against the determined opposition of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) and the Bolivarian Alliance of South America. Bourgeois Russia puts a stop to NATO’s encircling expansion in fascized Ukraine. Africa, which seemed to be asleep, is waking up in turn, with the expulsion of the French, European and US armadas from Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, which have just created the Confederation of Sahel States (AES) in their confrontation with NATO through terrorism manipulated by NATO imperialism and Afrikom.
This new situation reflects both the growing awareness of how dangerous the US imperialists and the EU are for the world, and the need to form a global front of nation-states and oppressed peoples to confront them.
We support the position of the 86 South American parties who firmly declare: “The resolution calls for ‘an immediate end to bombing and military action in Libya, and for the organization of a national dialogue so that, in a sovereign manner and without interference, the Libyan people can decide their own future’. The leaders of the Latin American left call on the United Nations to create an international commission to stop the armed conflict, and reaffirm their support for the peace initiatives of ALBA, the African Union and the group integrated by Brazil, Russia, China and South Africa”. The South American Revolutionary and Progressive Left rightly states: “Let’s remember that the information that dictator Gaddafi is ‘bombing the population of Tripoli’, which was the emotional trigger for the UN resolution and the media campaigns for intervention, has since been denied by the on-site envoys of Il Manifesto (Italy), of Telesur, as well as by Russian and US military experts… Paradoxically, the increasing massacres of Libyan civilians by NATO, the massacres in Yemen, Bahrain, Afghanistan, Palestine, Côte d’Ivoire, etc., or the Latin American and Caribbean peace initiatives, have not yet been confirmed. or the Latin American and African peace initiatives, have aroused little interest in these sectors. This ideological decline can be explained in a number of ways: disconnection from popular sectors, a shift to the right in European society, defensive repositioning in the face of emancipation in the South, condescension towards leftists on other continents, anti-Chavez catharsis and ‘anti-totalitarian’ brand images to be nurtured under the pressure of media dictatorship, etc.” (idem). Clearly differentiating the revolutionary processes in Tunisia and Egypt from the “coloured” destabilization pretext of colonial wars in Libya, Côte d’Ivoire and Syria, our comrades of the South American left add: “The popular rebellions in the Arab countries, among which Tunisia and Egypt stand out, show us that peoples cannot remain passive forever, but also remind us that global reaction and imperialism will never remain indifferent and will do whatever it takes to prevent the revolutionary upsurge”. Demonstrating the complicity of the European left, they remind us that colonization is still a reality in this world under the yoke of the US and European imperialists: “The persistence of colonialism constitutes a particularly serious situation for our continent, directly affecting Puerto Rico, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Curacao, Aruba, Bonaire, ‘French Guiana’ and the Argentine Falkland Islands” (idem), not forgetting Kanaky, Reunion, etc. (idem).
This debate raises the fundamental question of proletarian internationalism and solidarity between peoples, without which imperialism cannot be defeated. It raises the question of the indissoluble link between proletarian revolution in imperialist countries and anti-imperialist national revolutions in oppressed countries. In 1915, Lenin unmasked the opportunists who supported imperialist war: “The (Communists) have always understood a ‘defensive’ war to be a ‘just war’, in the sense (…) that the (Communists) recognize and continue to recognize the legitimate, progressive, just character of the ‘defense of the fatherland’ or of a ‘defensive war’. For example, if tomorrow Morocco declared war on France, India on England, Persia or China on Russia, etc… these would be just, defensive wars no matter who started them, and every (Communist) would call for the victory of oppressed, dependent, wronged states over oppressive, slave-owning, despoiling great powers” (Socialism and War). And Stalin explained the rightness of this revolutionary policy by the fact that “Leninism has proved, and the imperialist war and the Revolution in Russia have confirmed, that the national question can only be solved in conjunction with the Proletarian Revolution and on the terrain of the latter. That in the West, the road to victory lies in a revolutionary alliance with the liberation movement of colonies and dependent countries against imperialism. The national question is part of the general question of the Proletarian Revolution, part of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat” (National and Colonial Question).
The question of internationalist support for the struggle of oppressed peoples is “a part of the general question of the proletarian revolution, subordinate to the whole and demanding to be examined from the point of view of the whole” (Stalin, idem). Also, to determine an internationalist position, we need to understand that “under conditions of imperialist oppression, the revolutionary character of the national movement does not necessarily imply the existence of proletarian elements in the movement, the existence of a democratic basis for the movement” (idem). Finally, Stalin cites the example given by Lenin, who said that “the struggle of the Afghan Emir for the independence of Afghanistan is objectively a revolutionary struggle, despite the monarchist turn of the conceptions of the Emir and his supporters, because it weakens, disintegrates and undermines imperialism. However, the struggle of democrats and “socialists” of all stripes, of revolutionaries and republicans such as Kerensky and Tsereteli, Renaudel and Scheidemann, Chernov and Dan, Henderson and Clynes, during the imperialist war (in defense of the fatherland) was a reactionary struggle, because its result was to disguise, consolidate and triumph imperialism” (idem, Stalin).
Objectively speaking, Saddam, Milosevic, Gaddafi, Gbagbo, Assad, Béchir, Mugabe, Hamas and the whole of the Palestinian resistance, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Goïta, Traoré, Thiani of the AES, etc., but also Putin in bourgeois Russia, through their resistance, are helping to undermine, weaken and dismantle the criminal hegemony of the US and EU imperialists. Their resistance unmasks the imperialists by accelerating workers’ and peoples’ awareness of the intrinsic warlike nature of globalized capitalism. To a certain extent, their resistance makes it easier for the working class and oppressed peoples to understand the links between social regression, the impoverishment of workers in the West, imperialist oppression and colonial wars.
The involvement of Russia and China, who are beginning to counter NATO’s warlike intentions, is reshaping the global balance of power. It is now becoming increasingly clear that the globe is divided into two fronts that make up global geopolitics: the front of the imperialist aggressors―the USA, the EU, the UK, Israel and NATO―to maintain their global hegemony, and the front of the aggressed countries, peoples, nations and states that are resisting the war-mongers who are taking the path of the Nazi project.
By reversing roles, the imperialists create “enemies of peace, terrorists, dictatorships that must be punished, and whose peoples must be rid of”; they assume the posture of the “civilizers” of yesteryear in the name of the “right of humanitarian intervention”; they say that “peace is at this price”; they say more and more openly that they “prepare for war in order to have peace”. But as Karl Marx teaches, unmasking capitalist predators: “Of all the dogmas of the fanatical politicians of our time, none has caused so much damage as that which says: ‘To obtain peace, one must prepare for war’. This great truth, whose notable characteristic is that it contains a great lie: the war cry, which has called all of Europe to arms and generated such belligerent fanaticism that every new peace treaty is seen as a new declaration of war, and is avidly exploited. At a time when the states of Europe have become so many armed fields, whose mercenaries burn with the desire to pounce on each other and slit each other’s throats for the greater glory of peace, the only consideration before each outbreak of war is simply the insignificant details of which side to be on. As soon as this incidental consideration is satisfactorily settled by diplomatic parliamentarians with the help of the old slogan ‘to obtain peace, one must prepare for war’, one of those wars of civilization begins whose frivolous barbarity belongs to the best days of highway robbers, and whose cunning perfidy belongs exclusively to the most modern period of imperialist bourgeoisie” (quoted in Correspondance Internationale N°3, Spring 1981).
Humanity is heading for hardships even more severe than those imposed on the world by the Nazi project for world hegemony, which caused over 50 million deaths, because “The law best suited to the notion of the fundamental economic law of capitalism is that of surplus value, that of the birth and growth of capitalist profit. Indeed, it determines the essential features of capitalist production. (…) The main features and requirements of the fundamental economic law of present-day capitalism could be formulated roughly as follows: ensuring maximum capitalist profit through the exploitation, ruin and impoverishment of the majority of the population of a given country, through the systematic enslavement and plunder of the peoples of other countries, especially backward countries, and finally through wars and the militarization of the national economy used to ensure the highest profits” (J. Stalin, The Economic Problems of Socialism in the U.S.S.R., 1952).
The imperialists’ forced march towards war―including military confrontation with Russia and China, India and Brazil, to name but a few countries whose economic development is changing the balance of power to the detriment of the US imperialists and the EU―is leading to a global conflagration which we believe will be fatal to the imperialist brigands US, NATO and the EU.
As communists, patriots, Pan-Africans, democrats, anti-imperialists and internationalists, we must fight with the workers and peoples to consign globalized capitalism to the dustbin of history forever. Workers, the communist movement, progressive anti-liberal forces, patriots, pan-Africans, anti-imperialists, democrats and internationalists must say NO to colonial wars, peoples must resist imperialist terrorist aggression and the current inexorable march of NATO/US/EU towards World War 3. Together, we must demand and mobilize for peace.
And in the event of a world war unleashed by the USA and the EU, against China and Russia for example, the response must be revolutionary defeatism against the warmongers, leading to the revolutionary overthrow of the dictatorship of capital. This means joining up the struggles against social regression, fascization, fascism and for peace within the imperialist war-mongering countries, and the defensive resistance of Russia, China, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, the ESA, etc., which are targeted by the new cycle of imperialist wars.
Let’s re-establish the worldwide united front of the workers’ movement and peoples against high living standards, fascism and war.