SHORT NOTE ON THE CURRENT SITUATION
We are before a strategic setback of similar dimensions to the one which took place after the defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871, which prepared the conditions for the long term recovery of international capitalism.
We estimate that the consolidation process of capitalism in East Europe, as the bourgeoisie counterrevolution underway administered by the "communist" bureaucracy in China and the USSR, suppose a strategic defeat of the proletariat at world scale.
Without doubt this is a tragedy of bigger ideological and political transcendence than the fall of the Paris Commune . Why?
Because the exercise of worker’s power in those circumstances became exhausted in three months and it went very little beyond the struggle in the barricades against the French National Guard and the German army.
Although it left valuable teachings for the future, that experience of power exercise on part of the commoners lasted very little, so the international proletariat didn’t see all that as a failure of socialist management, but as the military defeat of an up-rising.
On the other hand, the self-dissolution of what the world knew as "real socialism", constitutes the deepest incursion of bourgeois dominance to the interior of the individual conscience of the wage-earners in all their history. To the eye of the proletariat this fact appears today as the final result without interruption, of the glorious worker’s October revolution, so the bourgeoisie sees its idea reinforced before world public opinion. That the wage-earners aren’t made for anything but to be given orders by the capitalist bosses and that any new attempt cannot end but in another failure.
For us this fact is, therefore, of a counterrevolutionary political projection that perhaps is not measured in decades, though in several lustrums.
In fact, the empirical evidence of the continued social dominance that the capitalist owners normally exercise over their salaried within their companies - and outside of them through the State ideological machines, representative of their collective interests of dominant class - confirms day by day the untruthful belief of the fact that we proletarians cannot do anything but receive orders.
The only apparent reality that was counter-weighting that bourgeois’ belief in the conscience of the world proletariat was the existence of the so-called "socialist field".
Once that counterweight disappeared under the form of a frustrated hope, we are attending the deepest setback to the classist political self-esteem in the conscience of the world proletariat, that we agree in attributing it to what happened from the fall of the Berlin Wall.
If not, even when we haven’t reached the bottom line, we think that the spectacular scope of the current offensive of the capital on the life and working conditions of the international workers movement, would have been without doubt impossible.
But neither are the objective conditions of the bourgeoisie the same now as then.
Nowadays, the bulk of global capital in functions is not measured by hundreds of millions of strong monetary units - as during the October revolution - but by hundreds of billions, and the social productive forces during the last seventy years have experimented an unprecedented growth bigger than in any other moment in the history of capitalism.
This growth of the capital bulk and of the productive forces supposes that - contrary to what is verified in the organism of animal species - the more the capitalist social body advances according to the accumulation process, the metabolism of capital becomes faster and faster, to the increasingly rapid pace in which the bulk of fixed capital is amortized by the incessant scientific-technical development applied to the production of surplus value .
In this way, the recovery periods become shorter and the depressions longer and deeper, therefore the material base of the system gradually becomes the best ally of the revolutionary vanguard In that it increasingly contributes to maintain the historical memory alive giving continuity to the revolutionary spirit within the discontinuity of the elemental class struggle.
The current depression of capitalism is very serious, the most serious and extended of all its history
As we observe in our subsequent work on the capitalist crisis, the huge capital bulk in functions thrown out of the surplus value producing instruments, presses to the decrease of the profit rate extending the long recessive phase of world capitalism that begun around the end of the sixties.
In this context, all the time that the bourgeoisie delays in getting hold of the bulk of existing exploitable population in Russia and China - still in large part out of the direct production of surplus value - is time that turns politically against it. Being that the only possibility that remains for it, not to leave its crisis but to palliate its effects, is stepping up its attacks on the already deteriorated life and working conditions of the proletariat under its current direct dominance, in the centre as well as in its periphery.
So that, the last word hasn’t still been pronounced and the decisive struggles are not behind but before us..
Decisive in the sense that the present circumstances entail a tragic alternative for humanity.
Because if in that time interval a relatively peaceful conversion to pure capitalistic development is not produced in these two immense countries, the pressure of spare capital becomes intolerable to the point of struggling to obtain the necessary social consensus to unleash a Third World War for the purpose of conquering the lost markets. Nevertheless the bourgeoisie has never been able to undertake a war without the tacit or explicit consent of its subordinate classes.
Well now, that consensus will depend on the outcome of the struggles that the proletariat of the capitalist countries still have before them.
And we do not mean the struggles in defence of the life and working conditions without leaving the capitalist system; because the crisis demands that those conditions deteriorate as a matter of life and death for the capital, completely preventing a successful struggle of this type within its limits.
So that at medium term the proletariat of the capitalist countries has two alternatives before them :
To decide to fight for power or serve again as cannon fodder in a new genocidal war beyond its class interests.
It is in this point where the slogan "socialism or barbarism" acquires all the dramatic dimension derived from the nature of things under the current system of living.
These are the agreements and the reasons that decided us
to become the Group of Marxist Propaganda
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