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CHECHNYA: ANOTHER MEDAL FOR IMPERIALISM
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Chechnya: Another medal for imperialism
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Chechnya: Another medal for imperialism
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The indignation against the Kremlin hangmen must go together with the exposure of the Western bourgeoisies' disgusting hypocrisy.

At the beginning of the Russian intervention, the American champion of peoples' freedom and rights, President Bill Clinton, hastened to support Yeltsin the hangman, provided that he did his duty in a rapid and possibly painless way. But, as soon as Yeltsin showed that he was getting too deeply into an Afghan-type trap, immediately the free-world press began to change its tone, and to speak of the Russian crimes and of Yeltsin's alcoholism (but not of Dudaev's all but clean past!), while Western diplomacy became much colder in its support of Moscow. In plain language: you can slaughter Chechnya, since it would not suit us to support any other step towards the Russian area's final dissolution (it would become a dangerous epicentre of uncontrolled and uncontrollable social tensions). But, do it quick and well, i. e. at a low cost. Otherwise, better to pin the patriot's medal on Dudaev's breast, to give him free hand against his own proletariat with the endorsement of the world counter-revolutionary fortresses, and to convince Yeltsin to rebuild his own power upon a narrower basis, lest the entire region be dragged into an adventure whose consequences in Russia itself could be much worse than the Chechen separation (the soldiers' mothers' demos are warning for everybody...).

In all this discourse, which bespeaks a pure interest, where are the famous «peoples' rights»? They are just in the opening lines of the lying proclamations always calling the workers of all countries to slaughter each other. English and American workers, beware!

Workers!

The indignation in the face of the arrogance of the Russian imperialism and of the hypocrisy of the Western one is most sacred. But it is not enough. By itself and in the stifling context of a still counter-revolutionary general situation, it can only turn into frustration. On the contrary, it can become a fecund element for the future, if it is joined by the awareness of the need of a truly Communist Party and of the struggle for its rebirth on a world level -only if it becomes a spur to the rebuilding of that revolutionary and internationalist movement, in which lies the only chance of salvation for the proletariat of all countries.

To do so (and its urgency is dictated not by the Chechen tragedy alone, but by the whole, world economic, social and political situation), it is necessary to start again on the basis of certain firm points:

a) the USSR of Stalin & Co (whose imperialist role Russia today cannot but resume) never was a communist country, as the internationalist communists never tired of repeating in the past sixty years against everybody's opinion. It surely was communist on the political level in the years immediately after October 1917, because it was led by a Communist Party. But on the economic level, the tasks it had to accomplish were those of a bourgeois revolution: of introducing capitalism as the necessary basis upon which it would be possible to proceed on the route to socialism, once the communist revolution had taken place in the Western, more developed, fully capitalist countries as well. But since 1926-30, when the Stalinist counter-revolution claimed it possible «to build socialism in one country» and abandoned any internationalist perspective slaughtering the Bolshevik old guard, since then the USSR were (and Russia openly is today) a completely capitalist country, non only on the economic level, but on the political one as well.

b) world capitalism prepares ever new wars, because its economy has cyclically the need to «recover' from the illness of recession thanks to a bloodbath, able to rejuvenate it by destroying on a large scale constant capital and excess labour and thus re-establishing the conditions for a new cycle of increase in capital value.

c) in its irresistible race towards centralisation on a world level, capitalism inevitably foster peripheral, independent and politically irredentist counter-thrusts. These correspond to the formation of minor poles of capitalist accumulation, which up to a certain extent are independent. Capitalism cannot but create them in the course of its development. But at the same time, in the long run, it cannot allow their separate and centrifugal existence. The case of Chechnya is but a ring in this chain, as is (among the thousand cases of independence first allowed or suffered, then fought and eliminated) that of Bosnia.

d) The world recession is not the consequence of bad management on part of governments. It is a necessary aspect of the functioning of the capitalist mode of production:
an economic system which does not produce for the human well-being, but for the accumulation of profits (with the result of an ever greater clogging of the productive apparatus) can only be periodically hit by the illness of overproduction and thus face ever more catastrophical crises. The international and simultaneous character of the recent recessions is the best proof of the way in which the course of the productive cycle is independent from the various governments' greater or lesser wisdom and above all from their political colour.

e) The victory of stalinist counter-revolution since 1926-30 is the clearest proof of the correctness of the communist analysis and program. It is, in fact, a theoretical victory of true marxism, because it is the confirmation that it is impossible to «build socialism in one country», above all backward as Russia was, without the concurrence of the communist revolution in the most advanced countries (Lenin's writings are there to prove it, as well as those produced by our party on the span of half a century by now). The CPUS held the power for over seventy years because it shed its skin, i. e., it betrayed the cause of the international revolution by immolating it on the altars of the Russian state's national interests. And this meant the massacre of thousands of communist militants.

Not only the Russian events, but the whole course of world economy (which calls again for ever bloodier wars, even if, at the moment, only «regional» like the Chechen one, and, in perspective, for a new world war), all this is a further, bright confirmation of the validity and vitality of revolutionary marxism, of communism.

Capital knows very well, beyond all tales of political propaganda spread everywhere by ever more powerful mass media, that communism isn't dead. Capital knows very well that, as long as its own rule will exist, its historical enemy too will exist: communism. We too must know it, and thus draw the only possible lessons: to revive the class struggle and to rebuild the party which will lead it.

Source: «Internationalist Papers», n. 4, June 1997

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