The crises and the future of humanity
We said that with a given OCC, the bigger is the mass of population that from outside of the system joins the regime of salaried work for the production of surplus-value; further away moves the horizon where the over-saturation of capital unleashes the collapse of the system. On the contrary, the smaller becomes the mass of exploitable population for the capital, the smaller will the accumulated capital mass that reaches in the shortest time the absolute over-accumulation be and so, the shortest the period of time between crises.
In the light of the current Asian crisis, the depth and extension of the capitalist depression that begun at the end of the sixties, it is mainly explained, therefore, by the difficulties of the international bourgeoisie in converting overpopulated countries such as Russia and China in direct sources of surplus-value production.
The fact being that from the end of the sixties, the mass of accumulated surplus-value reached such an extension that it became paramount for the imperialist capital to remove all the obstacles which prevented it from getting hold not only of the working class of the socialist block countries but of the working class of the state-owned companies in the capitalist countries, specially in the periphery.
One of the main causes of the genocide committed by the chain of military dictatorships through the seventies in Latin America, undoubtedly is, the enormous pressure of this mass of idle capital searching for new sources of direct accumulation. An end had to be put, therefore, to the project of accumulation based in a bourgeois national State capitalism, on which the anti-imperialist ideology rode through all Latin America which political form synthesized in the "historical bloc" of power between the working class and the small and medium bourgeoisie of every peripheral country. An exploitation project that from the fifties prevailed for more than twenty years in the periphery of the system. The diplomatic corps of the imperialist countries is all the more sensible to the suggestions of the economic powers of their countries than the police and the army. The Spanish state has not been alien to all this operation
(6) The human rights ideology, directed nowadays towards prosecuting and incarcerating the direct executioners of such a monstrosity, only serves to hide to the eyes of the world’s public opinion the real perpetrators of the terror which took hold of hundred of millions of people of one continent for more than ten years.
This is how a considerable part of the enormous mass of over-accumulated value has found a productive application on what has been known as "foreign debt capitalization" -more than a trillion (a million million) dollars at the end of the eighties- consisting in settling that debt in exchange for the transfer of the state-owned factories to the hands of the private creditors. So, the imperialist capital has turned the workers of these factories of peripheral countries in a direct source of surplus-value production, attenuating thus the effects of the crisis.
It had the same strategic aim the enormous mass of surplus capital invested by the international bourgeoisie -especially the USA one during the Reagan era- to finance each of the warlike initiatives that successively ruined the Russian foreign policy of statu-quo. These successive rupture of the international balance of power on part of the international bourgeoisie -from the Angolan war in the sixties to the current conflict in the Balkans, the Afghan war and intercontinental ballistic missiles supremacy -obliged the URSS to keep a warlike economic effort incompatible with its post-capitalist social system.
These expenses, in the context of waste and total lack of stimulus that characterizes every bureaucratic administration, accelerated the inevitable bankruptcy of the Stalinist project of socialist construction. Today, as a product of the policy of rearmament and barefaced aggression of the imperialist countries caused by the need for new sources of exploitation for the surplus capital. The idle hundred of thousands of millions of dollars of the international bourgeoisie are on the point of completely reverting the property relations in the Eastern European countries annexed by the URSS after the second world war.
In today’s Russia, this process is much slower because of the contradictions that it causes. Nevertheless, the international capital is finding a lot of investment opportunities. As is reported by "Marxist debate" magazine, the 100.000 factories of the former Soviet state that from 1990 to 1994 passed to private hands, participate of 50% of the GDP of the new Russia in a regressive transit to capitalism, while a good part of the population of this country creeps in the most absolute misery. As for China, the influx of foreign direct investment in this country between 1985 and 1990 was an annual 6.400 millions dollars. Two years later, the progression of these investments had doubled to 11.000 millions, to reach in 1993 26.000 millions. That is how hundreds of millions of workers, that from the October revolution had remained out of capital’s control, are being once more turned into an exploitable population mass by direct capitalist means.
However, according to every evidences, -and the international stock markets devaluation in progress so confirms- all this barbarism favoured by the objective pressure of the multibillionaire mass of surplus capital in quest of new contingents of exploitable population in the world, still does not appear enough to draw international capitalism out of the slow growth that has been suffering since the end of the sixties.
Such is the objective logic that has preceded the social and human cataclysms in the imperialist period of capitalism. And the slogan "socialism or barbarism" is not just literature, but a reality each time more tangible. From 1914, two world wars, innumerable local wars, the periodic rise of bloody fascists, semi-fascists and military dictatorships, the extension of torture to more than 60 countries, all of this proves that the notion of "barbarism" is not abstract, nor a mystification, nor propagandist, but it is plenty of real content each time more dramatic.
But today, with the armament, and the nuclear over-armament, the dilemma "socialism or barbarism" takes a new dimension, still more precise. Today the world victory of socialism in the context of the world crisis of capitalism has turned into a question of physical survival for the human race. The long term dilemma that is: socialism or human destruction (7)
That’s in the long run. In the short and medium one international capital still faces serious obstacles and considerable resistance to put in practice a course of action for the re-conquest of lost markets. And the main obstacle in changing the sense of such a dynamic lies in the difficulties in converting China and Russia into countries of a pure capitalist nature. Let’s not forget that a country such as China has 21 % of the world population and a big part of the surplus work created in that country -the same as in Vietnam or Cuba- partially escapes the process of capitalist accumulation. To get hold of the means of work and raw materials of these two immense regions of the world to directly exploit its inhabitants under pure capitalist social forms, is the only thing that could take the international bourgeoisie out of the actual depression to enter in a new phase of sustained growth, as it happened after the big wave of destruction and death provoked by the second world war.
But it does not appear that this counterrevolutionary process will be accomplished but through a third world war. The movement of clear pro-bourgeois strategic content that some years ago failed in China during the serious events of Tiananmen Square, as the recent step back taken by the imperialist entente in Russia in relation to the program of pro-capitalist reforms initiated by the already exhausted Yeltsin government, leaves no doubt in relation to the serious difficulties facing the international bourgeoisie to swiftly finish ,only by the unravelling of its internal contradictions, with the control of the Russian and Chinese political burocracy over a big part of the means of production in these two big countries.
It is clear that the more this outcome is prolonged, the more it contributes to a warlike solution of such difficulties, pushed by the duration and seriousness, of the capitalist depression.
We are, then, before the real possibility of a third world war. And without doubt it will not be this a partial war of imperialist incursion on one so-called "Third world" country that we the workers of the big rich metropolis of the system can watch with impunity on TV, as was the case with the "Gulf war". This war, as the two preceding, will again have as its main set the physical, economic and population geography of the imperialist countries which belong to NATO. However, with the current level reached by the armaments, above all, but not only, the nuclear ones, we would have to multiply that destruction power at least by five in relation to the last world war, which implies the real risk of destruction of a big part of the material and human infrastructure on earth.
And in the perspective of the preparation for war, what is decisive for imperialism in this period, is to accustom the masses, politically and ideologically, to the irrational and monstrous. This is the central objective of the ideological offensive in the mass media and in the bourgeois universities. This is not only anti-Marxist, anti-communist, anti-socialist, but it is also a campaign against science, reason, even against the ideals of bourgeois revolution and the Age of Enlightenment. The barbarism of ideas precedes the barbarism of facts. And this barbarism of ideas has its starting point in the bourgeois’s tendency of making credible the systematic misrepresentation of social reality. Therefore a strong theoretical offensive must be unleashed to defend Marxism, socialism, science, and reason from the attacks of political stupidity endowed with a formidable mass media.
Now then, this war will not be on the agenda before serious defeats are inflicted over the world workers movement, and specially those of the imperialist chain. If we refresh our memory- and this must serve not to trip twice with the same stone - the course to the Second World War could have been radically changed if the confronting bourgeois fractions would not have agglutinated the workers of their respective countries behind their warmongering speech.
And that, the European and American bourgeoisie could not achieve until they got their subaltern classes to accept an austerity and rearmament offensive of a very similar size to the one they have been submitting us for the last decade.
In this sense, although we cannot say that everything is already decided and we inevitably march once more to the slaughterhouse, even though the decisive battles are before us and not behind us, we are certainly not in 1933 nor in 1938. But neither is it true that today it is less difficult than for our parents or grand parents in 1929. During the previous years to the rise of fascism (1933), the world workers movement was gripped by a central idea: capitalism is in crisis and the solution is socialist planning. Those were the times when the URSS almost completely avoided the terrible effects of unemployment and widespread misery of the capitalist world. This objective spirit is today almost totally absent from the ranks of the workers.
The bankruptcy of the so-called "real socialism" weights in these moments as a stone over the conscience and spirit of the world working class. The fact that this fall had been anticipated by the immense majority of the revolutionary militants from a totally different perspective, adds a new demoralizing factor that tends to paralyze any response to the system.
In fact, a good part of those who before the Spanish transition used to run in front of the Franco police in the name of a revolutionary socialism alternative to Stalinism, have totally gone to the side of the class enemy and nowadays almost all of their leaders live comfortably in the ideological and political machines of the bourgeoisie.
In this not very promising context it is the responsibility of the conscious workers to alert, by every means possible, that the duration and seriousness of the depression tends to rise the risk of a third world war if the austerity and re-armament offensive manages to debilitate or disarticulate the mass movements in the main capitalist countries of the world.
Because big wars always have their starting point in the political will and initiative of the bourgeois leaderships situated in the imperialist chain countries. We are perfectly conscious that a theoretical and propagandistic response as the one we wield here is not enough. While it does not exist in the real world a model of transitional society to socialism that hasn’t got the political arbitrariness, abuses, waste, inequalities and oppressions that took place in the so-called "real socialism", answers like ours will not convince everybody. But this is not the task nowadays. What’s important is to create public opinion linking with all of those minorities which nowadays show themselves honestly worried and without prejudice to know what is really happening around the world, with the sincere desire to contribute to improve it. This is the prerequisite to project to the majorities contributing in making conscious the necessity to participate in the construction of humanity’s future. This is, for us, not the only, but the most important task that the present circumstances of the world class struggle require.
To clean the social science, Marxism, of all the theoretical rubbish that has again been thrown over it, wielding its scientific arsenal and the best traditions of historical materialism. Tending to recreate a revolutionary organic intellectuality capable of assuming the current political responsibilities with efficiency, to build a socialist future that overcomes past errors with full theoretic certainty and political firmness.
What we are saying when we talk about the necessity of creating public opinion based in the social science for a general collective attitude involved with reality, is that the economy and the society had become too complex and carry with them too many risks of catastrophes as to be administer by no matter what kind of “experts”- and each time less competent- or by any kind of minority elites. At the same time we think that this world crisis is too big as to be left at the mercy of the “objective market laws" that shape themselves behind humanity’s back. This crisis will be the last one, only if at least a majority of workers take in their hands the administration of their own matters, the economy, the State, the society. For that, it is necessary to contribute, for the moment, so that the extensive vanguard of the working class shakes off a lot of prejudices introduced in the movement by the class enemy and has no scruples and decides ones and for all to understand and apply to the reality where they live, the principles of the modern social science, historical materialism.
(6) "Spain began to pay attention to Argentina virtually from 1976 (year of the begging of the last military dictatorship). It was the beginning of the "argentine miracle" as it was called by the Spanish businessmen. In the majority of cases, the landing of the Spanish companies in Argentina was made through the Spanish government . In this sense the official trip of the king Juan Carlos opened the tap of a lot of business" Magazine MERCADO. 2nd fortnight of February 1982.
The tap of Spanish businesses in Argentina -that wasn’t opened by the king but the dictatorship of General Videla, now incarcerated by mediation of the Spanish justice- gave way for, once the “subversive threat” was defeated, the Spanish companies of the INI, as Standard Electrica, Telefonica, Intel, etc... to profit from the appetizing market of the free exploitation of salaried work in Argentina, a cake made with fighting anti-imperialist blood and management profits, to which the Spanish justice and different human rights organizations are putting the final touch twenty years later:
"Spain is today the main European investor in the region. It designates to Latin America more capitals than to the UE. So, the investment market value of Telefonica Internacional in the area exceeds the 5.000 millions of dollars and the main banks exceed 4.000 millions of dollars.
The Santander and the BBV are the third and the fourth banks of Latin America in volume of assets. This investing penetration has been achieved until now by a small number of companies, but solid bases have been established for companies of smaller size to do the same in a region that, leaving some topics aside, is an attractive differential ,(super-profit), to our economy(El pais 22/3/97.Editorial page 12.What’s between brackets is ours).
TThe juridical trinkets that pettifogger judges like Garzón are offering the world, must not mar in our consciences the fact that, because of the state terrorism which the world capital ordered to execute to its faithful servants such as Videla and Pinochet more than twenty years ago, Spain has nowadays become the “main investing power” in Latin America after the USA. According to the actual Finance Minister Rodrigo Rato, these investments are "an strategic option" for the Spanish government. An opinion shared by financial agents as Miguel Sebastian, Studies director of BBV, for whom the Latin American workers are objects of available appropriation through exploitation franchises to interchange for others the same way as children interchange postcards.
"It is a long term strategy to be there for a long time. A strategy that will serve us as interchange with others banks for future alliances. It is as having some postcards: we have postcards of Latin America to be able to interchange with other banks - the North European ones- that have a franchise in Eastern Europe or Asia". (Investigation Services of TVE).
A strategic from which the Spanish army cannot be absent:
¿Is the air force prepared to take part in Kosovo?
"It is prepared to take part in Kosovo or where our government decides that we must take part to defend the national interests">>(General J.A. Lombo, Chief of the Air Force in statements to El Pais 12/10/98. Page 20).
And obviously, the initiative of judges like Garzón and García Castellón in relation to odious murderers like Videla and Pinochet, serves the purpose today so that a lot of Latin Americans are perhaps naively mortgaging their human and political dignity for a future reality even more terrible, because by saluting the current penetration of the imperialist Spanish capital in exchange for feeling temporarily fulfilled in their genuine aspirations for justice, are contributing to set the necessary jurisprudential precedent to legitimate a new genocide, according to what, not in vain, General Lopez has just forecasted.
7.At this point we could make ourselves the following question: ¿ Is it rational for capitalism, even headed by right or extreme right politicians, to guide themselves to a “solution” of the crisis through the nuclear world war? But this question is wrongly posed, because it supposes conceding the virtue of rationality to a living way substantially irrational, because in a society where the behaviour and destiny of people in normal circumstances is set by something as incontrollable as the market, and where by mediation of the inter-capitalist irrational competition it arrives to the need and real possibility of wars, the result of this internal logic cannot be other than war.
So, that there truly exists an irrational base in the project of nuclear war, doesn’t mean that this project is not achievable. Auschwitz was also irrational, not only from a human point of view but to the global interests of German imperialism, even from a military point of view, to triumph in the war. However Auschwitz was done.
October 1998
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