Alberto García Barcala | Unión Proletaria (Spain)
The NATO meeting in Ankara aims to bring the imperialists into alignment in the face of the current intensification of social contradictions on an international scale. In the words of its Secretary General, Mark Rutte, the goal is to make NATO “a stronger, fairer, and more lethal alliance.” The leaders of the United States, Europe, and Japan share a common determination to escalate aggression against the peoples of the world in order to dominate and exploit them. They stand on the same side when it comes to encircling Russia, arming Taiwan, provoking the DPRK, massacring the Palestinian people, seeking the kidnapping of the President of Venezuela, strangling Cuba, practicing terrorism against Africa’s independence, and carrying out countless other acts of barbarism. The only issue they are debating is how to divide among themselves both the costs and the spoils of their crimes.
The fundamental cause of growing international tensions lies in the fact that capitalist profit is obstructing its own source: the development of the productive forces. While national economies dominated by the most advanced, monopolistic, and financial forms of capital stagnate—suffocated by parasitism, debt, inflation, and similar problems—other economies that protect themselves from transnational capital continue to increase their productivity and competitiveness. In order to remedy their decline, the capitalist magnates of the West resort to plunder, making use of NATO as their collective military instrument.
The spontaneous development of this contradiction leads to war between imperialist states and sovereign states (and even among the imperialists themselves), destroying a sufficient mass of productive forces to allow the victors to restart capitalist accumulation at full speed, as occurred after the Second World War. Of course, today the circumstances are not the same: nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction exist that could annihilate all parties involved, and anti-imperialist states have acquired a degree of strength and wisdom that enables them to resist while the aggressor countries sink deeper into their internal contradictions. Despite these differences, the tendency toward a Third World War continues to prevail, pointing toward the longest and most painful path to the eventual demise of imperialism.
To shorten and ease this spontaneous process, we must catalyze it through conscious action directed toward socialism, which is the radical solution to capitalism and its imperialist offspring. In sovereign countries, this must be done by supporting the national resistance of their governments, and therefore in a more peaceful and reformist manner. In countries governed by imperialists or their lackeys, however, we must oppose the mobilization of the people behind plans of external aggression and direct them toward struggle against their true enemy: the capitalist class that rules them. That class seeks to prevent us from doing so by promoting militarist, supremacist, corporatist, authoritarian, servile, and anti-communist ideas and practices—in short, fascist ones.
At present, popular struggles fail to advance because they are directed only against one or another partial phenomenon, but not against the capitalist system that causes them. Battles are fought over wages, pensions, public services, housing, equality, peace, and other issues, yet their participants do not connect these struggles to imperialist oppression of other peoples. Solidarity with peoples under attack mobilizes only a minority—usually motivated more by humanitarian than by scientific and revolutionary considerations—while the majority are persuaded by chauvinist propaganda or tolerate it with indifference.
The brutal and disproportionate response of Israeli Zionism to the heroic Palestinian resistance was an exceptional case, provoking the indignation of broad masses. Even sections of the labor movement mobilized through dockworkers’ actions and general strikes. Some Western “left” governments were compelled to offer superficial criticism of Israel in order not to lose their electoral base. Nevertheless, the protests gradually subsided following the destruction of Gaza, the media blackout, and the continuation of a genocide that has persisted since 1948.
To overcome this impotence, it is necessary to achieve the three principal objectives of the World Anti-Imperialist Platform, which, as Comrade Stephen Cho explained, are closely interconnected: “the strengthening of the anti-imperialist struggle, the strengthening of ideological struggle within the anti-imperialist and communist movements, and the strengthening of communist forces worldwide.”[1]
The first of these objectives is the most important, because only its success will allow humanity to begin the transition from capitalism to socialism, thereby ending all exploitation and oppression of one part of society by another. The Platform has fostered relationships and conferences involving hundreds of diverse anti-imperialist organizations across the globe. It has refuted revisionist, opportunist, and sectarian deviations that divide the necessary united front against imperialism. It has also supported communist organizations in various countries that were weakened after the defeats of the 1990s, providing them with both a forum and an international beacon to guide them correctly in “crushing the principal enemy and unleashing a new wave of revolutions throughout the world while the imperialist system sinks ever deeper into crisis and fails to revitalize itself through new conquests and wars.”
However, we must take another step forward in this direction so that the broad masses can carry out this task, because only they possess the power to do so. Most communist organizations remain too small and must develop into genuine communist parties capable of uniting anti-imperialism and socialism with the workers’ movement.
The working class constitutes the majority of the population, at least in the more economically developed countries. Yet workers can become conscious that their interests are opposed to those of the imperialists and can understand their socialist historical mission only if communists explain these realities to them through the course of their spontaneous activities—whether in workplaces, schools, trade unions, or other arenas. Left to themselves under capitalist domination, workers can understand their most immediate problems and needs, but not those that are more distant in time and space.
Communists must organize primarily in order to teach workers how to connect their immediate tasks with their ultimate goals. The means to achieve this include political programs, propaganda, agitation, the press, participation in mass struggles, and other forms of activity. Only in this way can we generate sufficient social mobilization to put an end to the wars, misery, and suffering that imperialists inflict upon the world. Therefore, we are convinced that advancing the struggle against imperialism requires the construction of strong communist parties in every country.
The World Anti-Imperialist Platform can and must play a decisive role in accomplishing this task, at least in two respects:
• Encouraging the stronger communist parties within the Platform to share their experience with weaker communist organizations.
• Developing the Workers’ Platform that we are now creating, in order to link workers’ immediate demands with the anti-imperialist struggle of all popular forces.
Long live anti-imperialist unity!
Long live the struggle of the working class!
Forward to socialism!
Note
[1] https://waporgan.org/?p=2650
