Communist Party of the Peoples of Spain (PCPE)
Previous considerations
This, like every contribution that the PCPE makes, has the intention of clearly orienting itself to situate the necessary theoretical framework for the indispensable intervention in the political struggle. We understand that this should be the reason and pretension of the communist parties and of the revolutionary forces as a whole.
The Marxist-Leninist organizations must correct the error of carrying out our analysis exclusively on the economic elements. It is necessary to go further, and take the analysis to the complex relations, and changing in time, between the economic base and the superstructure. Understanding both as components of the same dialectical unity, as a coherent and articulated totality, where their internal contradictions constitute the factors of their weakness, where revolutionary action must strike.
The most degraded version of this absurdity is the simplism and schematization in the theorization carried out by the promoters of the so-called “imperialist pyramid” which presupposes that at present all social formations are imperialist, a position of simplistic cretinism that is only defended in an endogamic sphere, provoking the propagation by its emulators and distracted currents that intoxicate the International communist movement.
Lenin himself, in the Prologue to Imperialism, superior phase of capitalism, states that due to the tsarist censorship he was “forced to limit himself strictly to an exclusively theoretical analysis—above all economic—, but that he also had to formulate the indispensable and not very numerous political observations with the greatest prudence” and that “we will not dwell, however much it deserves it, on the non-economic aspect of the problem”. Consequently, to limit the analysis of Imperialism to a strictly economic question and to neglect the rest of the political, social and cultural aspects it has is a mistake.
It is impossible to speak of Imperialism without considering that from its material reality, which fully obeys the laws of development of capitalism, we speak of “a civilization with its particular ways of thinking, acting and relating to other humans and the cosmos[1]”, which has imposed itself with extreme genocidal violence over more than five centuries, generating an extraordinary and incalculable accumulation of capital in the West, by genocidal dispossession of the rest of the peoples and cultures of the planet.
It corresponds to Marxist-Leninists, to revolutionary thought, to make a global analysis for revolutionary political action. This means to look at reality situating the main categories of analysis, and to place before the working and popular masses a program for the Social Revolution.
Outline on imperialism
Imperialism is the “superior phase of capitalism”. Therefore it must be analyzed as a historical development of a mode of production in its advanced phase, not initial and not of maturity, a stage of decomposition. This advanced development has weakened (cornered) its initial free competition, concentrating all economic power in the hands of the monopolies. The dictatorship of capital is already the dictatorship of the power of the monopolies, the dictatorship of their governments, of their political parties, of their state institutions, of their instruments of repression and violence, of their lifestyles, of their models of consumption. It is this highly developed process of growth and concentration of capital that gives rise to new needs of the system of capitalist domination. Let us analyze this question, as imperative needs, product of its degree of development, and also of the internal difficulties (contradictions) generated by this same degree of historical development.
It appears, in this transit, the imperious need for the “export of capital”. The national sphere has long since fallen short to valorize capital, and has advanced to a higher stage, where new circuits of valorization are opened through the export of these capitals to other countries. In order to guarantee the stability/permanence of these new circuits, political control of these countries, and also of the routes to these countries, is necessary. Therefore, the inescapable need for political control of the countries to which these capitals are exported is implicit.
The overwhelming advance of scientific-technical development creates new conditions for the valorization of capital, not only because of its degree of concentration and centralization, but also because for the production of any commodity imperialist capitalism needs to exploit the world working class. This has nothing to do with colonialism which was “limited” to extracting products and productions subjecting and exploiting a concrete working class of a certain place; we are in another later/superior phase.
It is necessary to analyze what oppressions (violence) capital needs to establish in this imperialist phase to try to give stability to this process of reproduction of capital. A system of limited sovereignties, ideological control, the tutelage of local powers, an adequate international order, …; all this ensured with the military organization operating in all corners of the planet.
This same scientific-technical advance (anthropocene) leads to the concurrence of diverse imperialist powers competing with the same objectives of capital export in the same places and in the same circuits (value chains, lately). Thus we arrive at the destruction of the ecological niche necessary for the continuity of life of the human species, in a fierce competition for the same resources between powers. The leap in scientific knowledge, and the development of the productive forces associated with it, endows the imperialist formation with extraordinary capacities to intervene/alter/modify almost any natural resource or element known to mankind. These capacities, within the logic of capital accumulation, become a systemic risk for everything. For life, for social stability, for ecosystems, for the very internal coherence of the human species. It is a necessity, of the first order, that the elaborations of the revolutionary field broaden their visual focus to a reality in permanent accelerated change.
Due to the high degree of concentration of capital, competition is fiercer every day (oligarchic fractions compete internally in each country, and oligarchies of different countries compete among themselves) and also compete for the growing scarcity of resources necessary for the production of goods; then war appears as a determining factor in the process of reproduction of capital and competition between imperialist powers. But we must understand that we are already facing a war that has nothing to do with what we have known so far in our history. The current war, with the most impressive technological advances, weapons of a lethality never known, hypersonic missiles, lasers, various nuclear weapons, electronic communications interference, environmental pollution, destruction of large infrastructures, etc., come to place the war in a frightening new dimension, and also systemic. The main promoter of war on a planetary scale is the collective West, with the USA at the head in its desperation to avoid its decline as the world’s leading power. NATO is the world terrorist organization that puts at risk the entire humanity.
The working class, in this scenario, becomes exploited as a whole as a single world unit, with a previously unknown explicit dimension. Let us analyze the situation of the working class in the central powers, how it is subdued and exploited as a function of the world totality, and how its value depreciates and its living conditions deteriorate. The price of labor power, even in this central capitalism, is situated in a dimension inferior to its reproductive value. There are no longer colonies in the classical sense, but there is a well differentiated situation between the imperialist center and the subjugated areas of the peripheries of the system, an international system of limited sovereignties, which is a direct inheritance of the old colonial system. This factor allows a differential between the circuit of production and the realization of surplus value, which gives a respite to the straitjacket that is the tendential fall of the rate of profit.
Let us analyze the contradictions within the bourgeoisie. World oligarchy is a category that needs to be analyzed and dimensioned. Oligopolies and transnationals. Dependence and fragility of this system of giants. The national (state) realities are losing their capacity to maintain their stability in the face of the fierce struggle of the oligarchic factions themselves, which jeopardize the continuity of these same state formations when they become obstacles to solve the difficulties of some of the warring factions. In the next stage, profound crises will develop that will affect the stability of state formations, calling into question the limits and capacities of nation-states to contain these extreme contradictions. And which will be used as a pretext by the major powers for their intervention on the sovereignty of these countries, opening the way to a new international order that will advance in the subjugation of many countries to the central powers. We are seeing this scenario with the EU, under the pretext of the war in Ukraine.
Let us now go on to outline how the processes of social transformation must take place, let us define subjects, relations and transitions. Only organized masses, under revolutionary political leadership, will be able to give an answer to this current situation.
This system (economic order) does not admit two heads, but its tendency is to impose a single head and this will not be resolved, in essence, in the economic field, but will be resolved in the field of war. We must review our enthusiasm for multipolarity, perhaps we are distracted from the main thing and we convert the tactical framework and temporary, limited and punctual alliances, as a priority, as opposed to the strategic and really determining one of the class struggle and the struggle for Socialism.
If there is a power that has the disposition to dominate the world on the basis of its military capabilities—the USA—the only possible game will be that of war. If we are wrong in this we will be left without capabilities for intervention in the class struggle.
In capitalism the necessary material basis for the beginning of socialist construction has already been created. This has to be a powerful weapon in the hands of the revolutionary vanguard. It is necessary to give it development and discourse for practical intervention in the concrete class struggles. To outline how is the revolutionary process that has to be given for the beginning of socialist construction. This will be the most effective way to fight against the warmongering development imposed today by the dictatorship of capital. We insist little on this, and we do not do pedagogy; we are losing precious time that later will be very difficult to recover.
To make some conclusions for the definition of the vanguard Party that corresponds today, with the forms of struggle, on the tactics, on the phases and the accumulation of forces, … If we do not arrive until here we go very orphaned. In the current difficult scenario of the ICM, the definition of the political proposal of intervention is an urgent necessity. Political in essence, understanding that this political concreteness is the concrete expression of an ideological position defined with the coordinates outlined here.
The World Anti-imperialist Front (FMA)—theoretical nomination of the PCPE since its foundation in 1984—is a determining question, and there is the need to materialize it urgently. But it cannot be understood today as a prolonged process of accumulation of forces, but as the need for a launching-ultimatum that must be put on the table by a revolutionary vanguard determined to assume its historical responsibilities before the present.
The bet of the PCPE for the concretion of the FMA goes through a concentric development that advances from the communist coordination for the effective intervention against the III GM (NATO, bases), blockades and sanctions, defense of sovereignty against the interventionism of the IMF, WB, WTO … in short, in defense of life against imperialist destruction, that places Socialism as the possible alternative for the working class and the peoples of the world. A second circle is the one in which we intervene coordinately in a tactical framework of alliances that, always pushing in the sense of denouncing war, interference and the destruction of the ecological niche, has a tactical foundation exclusively based on specific political agreements. But all this determined by a totalizing vision of the extreme coordinates of the world class struggle.
In summary, this question must be approached with the understanding that the communist parties are facing a scenario of the development of capitalism in which we face the need to change our formulations, which correspond to previous phases of the sharpening of the internal contradictions of capitalism, and that today we are facing a new reality to which it is necessary to respond in concrete and updated terms to the degree of confrontation, degradation and extreme violence, faced by Humanity. As part of this new scenario, the vanguard has to formulate a hypothesis of how the transition to socialist society can take place, to concretize a proposal, a process of accumulation of forces, some alliances, a tactic to strike at the contradictions of the current capitalist formation and through this to advance the forces of social change, of social revolution.
Some ideas to finish situating the framework of praxis
To speak of Imperialism—the superior phase of capitalism—disregarding aspects or ignoring in its totality the history of colonial domination is a grave error. It is even more so if the practical and theoretical revolutionary accumulation of the struggle against colonial and anti-imperialist domination is not taken into account.
Modernity, which is the secular historical episode on which Western domination and the development of capitalism is based, is once again in a profound crisis. The greatest crisis it suffered was undoubtedly the consolidation of October and the advance of the USSR, but also decolonization and the development of the project initiated at the Bandung Summit. With different characteristics, undoubtedly, the other is today. A reality determined by the general structural crisis of capitalist development and the articulation of a new scenario, each day with greater economic, political and military potential, which is the Multipolar World or Space.
The historical episode of the New World Order (NWO), imposed by the USA and NATO after the defeat of the USSR, can only be sustained on the basis of the absolute hegemony of the USA and its allies. The economic loss of this position vis-à-vis China, makes it extreme its degree of violence and desperately seeks confrontation. To date, Pax Americana has left a trail of millions of dead and destroyed countries (Iraq, Yugoslavia, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Panama, Libya… with the Indonesian precedent of what has been called the “Jakarta method”), but resists doing so without further violence, and even without ruling out the nuclear option.
This NWO has not only confirmed all Lenin’s economic analyses, but has also confirmed:
* The contempt for International Law and the supranational institutions generated after WW II, for questioning its absolute hegemony and domination.
* The exacerbation of each and every one of the characteristics of imperialism that Lenin described in his pamphlet: monopoly as a consequence of the concentration of production, union of industrial and banking capital, development of interventionist (colonialist) policies, parasitism….
The NWO is the zenith of supremacist modernity which expresses itself in all its development and generates all its contradictions. Faced with this, and constituting an alternative to the domination of the USA and NATO, a new international scenario emerges which continues to be situated in the capitalist context and, logically, maintains the same tendencies and contradictions of capitalist development. However, there are differential factors that cannot be ignored: state planning of the economy in many of its main economies—mainly China—, greater productive capacity—less parasitic—, demographic capacity, extractive economic potential, less debt and dependence on monetarism… that build a different scenario to the fully mature and decadent capitalism represented by the bloc led by the USA and nucleated around NATO.
Along with these economic differences, there is the national and sovereignty element that no Leninist can ignore. All the countries which, in a very complex diplomatic architecture woven mainly by Chinese and Russian diplomacy over the last decade, confront or question the absolute hegemony of the West and its role of unilateral sheriff of international relations, base their claims on the defense of their national sovereignty and respect for their culture and values. For them, the existence of UN-type international consensus institutions and respect for international law is the only guarantee for recovering the margins of sovereignty that the Bretton Woods institutions and financial capital almost absolutely deny them.
The unreserved denunciation of colonialism and neocolonialism is a line of connection, at least formally, of the revolutionary camp with the Multipolar space from which to make a tactical intervention and weave alliances.
The evidence of the falsity of bourgeois representative democracy as a true democracy and, even more, as a model of universal democracy, breaks the fallacious argument of the defense of “freedom and democracy” of Western imperialism against all peoples who do not accept its absolute domination.
Today, at the international level, a new stage is opening up for the development of the class struggle which, in the last analysis, is where all social development is decided. Only if there is a decisive intervention in favor of Socialism by the revolutionary forces, this new reality can have a favorable development for the interests of the working class, in particular and of the peoples, in general, who continue to suffer the threatening boot of imperialism in its resolute and criminal coup disposition. To correctly combine tactical flexibility with strategy and principles, is the only guarantee for, from class independence, developing correct alliances and facilitating processes of accumulation of forces.
The struggle for peace is fully connected to the struggle for Socialism. The revolutionary forces must make a banner of the struggle for Peace and turn it into a space of mass struggle for the definitive liberation from capitalist exploitation. The alternative to the “dictatorship of Capital” is not the “democracy of Capital”, it is the liberation from capitalism.
It will be a double grave error to consider:
1) The inevitability of nuclear war.
2) To consider that the new multipolar scenario can defeat Western imperialism and destroy its hegemony without its recourse to violence and war.
Anti-imperialist work requires diverse scenarios in which the most diverse alliances are built. On the one hand, open spaces in which to develop initiatives based on political agreements with the most diverse actors. On the other hand, frameworks of the International Communist Movement which, likewise, must advance on political agreements that allow to make relevant for the development of the class struggle the slogans and agreements adopted. An ICM that has to recover its historical signs of identity with the leadership of the PPCC that conquered power and have at their disposal the experiences of the liberation struggles they victoriously achieved.
The consideration of NATO as the main enemy of Humanity is the basis on which to work the alliances. As a proposal on which to work the political agreements, the following points are worth mentioning:
• The rejection of the domination of the USA and the international presence of its military bases.
• Active opposition to NATO and its warmongering policies.
• The consideration of the EU as an imperialist inter-state union.
• Denouncing Zionism and its genocidal policies.
• Opposition to trade blockades and sanctions.
• The fight against fascism and Nazism.
• The identification of the INTERNATIONALIST Solidarity with the anti-imperialist position.
Finally, some considerations and assessments to illuminate the antagonisms in the practices of the economy in China and the USA. Some of them are incorporated in the wording of this contribution, but we must further emphasize that:
The greatest threat to Imperialism is not the People’s Republic of China, but Peace.
The USA has been configured, since its foundation, from the wars in which it has participated and promoted, where, after more than 250 years, only 5 of them have been without wars.
Therefore, their economy is based on the empowerment of the industrial military sector, which is the one that generates so many jobs. At the moment that peace prevails over war, the construction of ships, planes, missiles and other military equipment will become useless material, impossible to impose even on their allies, behaving as obsolete, disposable and ruined sectors. Unemployment, begging and violence will prevail in a society built under the signs of the most antisocial individualism.
The People’s Republic of China is the largest factory in the world, where the Marxist theory of value operates in a much more resounding way, where only labor, that is, the productive forces, generate surplus value through the material amount of time socially necessary to convert the product into merchandise.
Consequently, capitalism is configured, beyond its warlike production, in an anarchic economy that, attending to its famous law of Supply and Demand, provokes the anticipated obsolescence of products of goods and services that do not find satisfaction even with the fetishistic appendix with which the consumer’s desires are usually invaded. For this reason, the pocket of poverty in the capitalist countries continues to increase without any possibility of being stopped.
On the contrary, the socialist economy is based on planning, that is to say, on producing according to the needs to be covered collectively, giving priority to vital elements such as food. After the constitution of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the first objective was to eradicate hunger and the government, under the guidance of the Communist Party, set itself to this goal.
In short, imperialism (the USA) needs war. The People’s Republic of China needs peace.
The confrontation for world hegemony is related to antagonisms impossible to eradicate. The organizations that emerged from Breton Woods, managed by US imperialism (IMF, WB, WTO, etc.) are now being questioned by many states that were helped under their protection and subjugation. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization, created in 2001, continues to receive requests to join an organization that will have its own Bank and currency for transactions carried out within the framework of its member states. Trade, Finance, Currency will radically alter a false balance imposed by imperialism that threatens the sovereignty of states and governments.
Notes
[1] Quote by Ramon Grosfoguel from the book “From the sociology of decolonization to the new decolonial anti-imperialism”.
