The mole keeps on digging
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THE MOLE KEEPS ON DIGGING
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Ten years have by now passed since the «fall» of the Berlin Wall, the same that (to listen to the pies in the sky of bourgeois servilism) would have squared the capitalist circle and engendered a «new» order destined to bring «peace» and «well-being» everywhere, under the benevolent tutelage of democratic America. A span of time in which the early enthusiasms of the capitalist world have instead become uncertainty, fear and open conflict.

The economic crisis in the offing first of all is not considered a localised event anymore, so to speak, a «crisis made in Asia». If we have there a vast mass of the poor and the downtrodden, and consequently an incessant increase in the migrations which have resulted from the crisis, there is on our side a rise in unemployment and instability, a sort of insecurity that dominates the present, and the effects of poverty even amongst those who are gainfully employed.

In the Western world, labelled as democratic and developed, the bourgeoisie is forced to block the door of the social control. She does it thanks to the backing given her by Social democracy, which is becoming more and more reactionary. She does it by the explicit nullification of various parliamentary and democratic institutions, favouring instead the strengthening of executive structures and the activity of social corporativism; and she proclaims the supremacy of monetary and market values over those of the welfare state - that it to say, that sort of social imprisonment of the proletariat which is brought about by the excessive profits extorted by imperialism in the non-white continents of the world, and which is used to corrupt numerous strata of the «aristocracy of labour» and the leadership of the labour unions - in short the material base of opportunism of all sorts.

Economic totalitarianism, which is the manifestation of the imperialist phase of capitalism (that is to say, the parassitary predominance which financial capitalism exercises on a world scale, and the overwhelming concentration of capital and of all its contradictions) is bound to result in political totalitarianism, be it expressed in structures that are democratic or openly fascist ones.

Therefore, instead of the realm of «peace» brought about by «free trade» the reality of our time is dominated by the conflicts recurring again and again between States, be they latent or openly engaged in. The historical law of the fall in the median rate of profit compels all bourgeois entities to employ their full potential (be it economic or political strength, diplomatic or military) so as to be able to maintain their portion of the world market, to guarantee the profits of their national capitalism, or the solidity of their currency vis-a-vis their competitors.

The imbalance in the pace of development, that typical manifestation of capitalist growth, modifies the positions of strength between various States, at the same time that it enhances the most inherent law of capitalism, competition. This becomes of necessity competition between States on a world scale, bringing about economic blocs and alliances, of the same transitional nature as their quick and inevitable breaking up and becoming ineffectual (see Apec in the Asia-Pacific area; and by the same token in the long run Europe will be no exception).

Open warfare then becomes the order of the day in the West (elsewhere it never stopped being so); all the so-called Western democracies come forth with their military apparatus, their intelligence services, their financial and humanitarian «aid», from Iraq (we examine that separately); to Kosovo (where the clash is widening - «by proxy» - amongst the strongest capitalist entities, with the aim of a more intense partition of the Balkans. so as to give them a better strategic position in the world wide struggle); to Central Africa (where the never ending grab for natural resources continues ceaselessly, having already brought down veritable empires that had seemingly consolidated their existence under the wing of decolonization); to Central Asia and the Trans-Caucasian Region (where it becomes more and more apparent that the Russo-Iranian strategic axis is in place to contain a Turkish expansion backed by the US).

The above doesn't concern us as mere news reporting, rather as a succession of frames composing the social dynamics of capitalist development Only Marxism has been able to make a dialectical analysis of this dynamics. Only Marxism has proven that the nature of bourgeois dominance is by historical necessity a transitory one, and by the same token that its defeat must be necessarily violent, at the behest of the proletariat that has come into existence because of capitalism - a proletarian class that is forced by the same social dynamics to rise and struggle against bourgeois power: because only by destroying this so-called bourgeois «civilisation» the proletariat will finally be able to put an end to war and to the ills engendered by bourgeois peace, whose violence it has to withstand in great measure indeed.

The dialectics of historical development, the worsening of the crisis, the militarization of the economy that is its corollary, the widening and the deepening of inter-imperialist face-offs and contradictions, war as a necessary derivant and an objective way out of the evolution of capitalism and its exigencies in conserving itself during its imperialist period - all of the above will again bring to the forefront, even in the atrophied West, the resurgence of the class struggle and the necessity of world revolution.

The process in which this will happen will be neither linear nor gradualist, and it will mean that the working class is called to fight for its very existence by the same extreme contradictions that capitalism creates but is unable to eliminate. In the struggles to come, the proletariat will live again the traditional past of its class. the meaning of its unity and of its tools for struggle, first of all the Communist Party.

No road can be taken, no revolutionary situation is possible without the Party, because the Party is the only one that even in dastardly times like the ones we have now has been the mainstay of the future of the proletarian movement, especially against the opportunistic tendencies of the various «up-to-daters» of scientific socialism.

This occurs because of the full understanding the Party has of the fact that revolutions do not happen on demand or by voluntaristic deeds, and they are rather the climax of the historical process resulting on one side in the virulent wasting away of all the contradictions of modes of production destined to perish, and on the other in the intensification of the class struggles brought about by them.

It is only when these historical turning points occur, when the «masses are on the march», that the Party, having kept wholly to Marxist doctrine, can really meet the masses and gain an influence in their midst in opposition to the various factions that the bourgeoisie has marshalled, turning them at the end in the struggle against the capitalist class.

This is the task before us. We are guided in our work by the past and the teachings of the history of the Party, from Marx on to all the generations of unsung comrades who preceded us. In the certainty that the old mole keeps on digging and performs its masterful work.

Source: «Internationalist Papers», number 8, Spring/Summer 1999

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