Thursday 30 June 2022

Imperialism, Nation and Class Struggle


National-Revolutionaries - "Red Nazis", "Bolsheviks in disguise", "Nazi-Maoists", "Stalinists of the Right" or "Conservatives of the Left"? Our political opponents have been confused since the post-war national revolutionary movement came into being. Ideological pigeonholes and old dogmas no longer hold true and the old taboos of the traditional political camps are shaken when confronted with national revolutionary positions. There are nationalists who make no secret of their nationalist radicalism, but at the same time have elevated the class struggle against the capitalists to the highest principle. How is this possible? How can a nationalist stand for the class struggle against the capitalists? A revolutionary socialist class struggle for the nation? "They are controlled by the East!" cries the so-called "nationalist" right, for whom the protection of private property over the means of production has always taken precedence over the freedom of the nation. They have always seen the class struggle as a tool of an enemy foreign power, intended to destroy the so-called unity of the people. "They are Nazis in a new guise!" cry both the Marxists and the liberals, for whom people and nation have at best a tactical meaning and whose dream goal is the levelled "one world", free of ethnic and cultural differentiations, without independent nations. However, new problems require new questions and new questions require new answers. The fronts of the 19th century (which on closer inspection were also different from what school historians would have us believe), are no longer the fronts of today. The world of the last twenty years of the 21st century is at a point where these new fronts are becoming increasingly clear. Classes, ideologies, social forces, they are all in turmoil.


The New "One World" Imperialism


Today, when we speak of the nation, when we fight for its liberation, when we see nationalism as a progressive, emancipatory force, our opponent is different from the one who confronted the nationalists of the 19th century. It is no longer a question of freeing the merchant and the industrial citizen from the shackles of feudal restrictions; it is no longer even primarily a question of freeing some "small" nation from the rule of a "large" one. Even the concept of imperialism as the antithesis of national liberation can no longer be defined exclusively in terms of individual states.


Certainly, there is American imperialism, the imperialist neo-colonialism of England and France, there are also imperialist elements in German politics. However, all these phenomena, which the socialists of the 1960s were still railing against, are today becoming more and more evident for what they really are: different aspects or facets of one and the same multinational globalist corporate imperialism that penetrates into the very ends of the globe!


The capitalism of the 19th century was the grandfather of this corporate imperialism. It began as the competitive capitalism of individual entrepreneurs. Family fortunes were invested, increased, strengthened by bank loans, and factories were built that in the Netherlands are associated with names like Philips, Unilever, Shell, and so on. The origin, development and inner regularity of this were excellently described by Karl Marx in his economic works. This stage of capitalist development had already been completed for several decades when Lenin wrote his book "Imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism" in 1916. In it he accurately described what Marx had already foreseen: the course of capital concentration in the industrialised countries, which at the end of the 19th century gradually began to replace competitive capitalism. This was caused by the concentration of the economy under conditions of free competition, as Marx had described in his work "Das Kapital". The imperialist phase of capitalism was characterised by the concentration of productive forces as a result of ruinous competition, which led to the formation of cartels, trusts and monopolies, as well as the increasing incorporation of bank capital and industrial capital and thus the complete placing of national state apparatuses at the service of the capitalist classes. While competitive capitalism was still characterised by the export of goods, imperialism was characterised by the export of capital: investments were made in so-called "backward" countries; wages, land and raw materials were cheap here, new markets could be developed locally.


The imperialist states, which primarily included England, France, Germany and the US, secured these interests through military aggression ("gunboat policy") and the colonial conquest of entire continents. In this period, for example, British and French colonial rights were extended to large parts of North and Central Africa, parts of Africa and Oceania were colonised by the German Empire, and the third-ranking former colonial power Spain was crushed by the US, with the establishment of US colonies on former Spanish colonial soil (Philippines, Puerto Rico, etc.). Conflicts of interest between these national imperialisms and their national capital groups then led to the First World War; a thoroughly imperialist war, for which the blame must be laid not on one nation (e.g. Germany), but on the interests of conflicting national capitals.


The period from 1914 to 1945 can be seen as a time of great upheaval, as a transition phase to the nocturnal phase of capitalism. Lenin was mistaken when he considered the imperialism of his time, represented by individual states, to be the highest and final stage of capitalism. On the contrary, the human mill was turned further, the bulldozer was driven even more brutally over tribes, peoples and nations, even more nature and raw materials, people, material, soldiers and citizens, workers and peasants were sacrificed to the Moloch of capitalist industrial development. The revolutionary-socialist hope of Lenin and the Bolsheviks for the end of times proved to be false.


At the end of the Second World War, the USA had become the dominant power in the imperialist camp, the former European competitors had torn each other apart and eaten each other up. However, European capital was still there, in the colonies, in the production units, stocks and real estate that had remained intact, in the money that had been invested in neutral countries. Thus, although the US took over the political and military leadership of the Western world and was certainly the most powerful economically, the US capitalists could not easily absorb European capital. On the contrary, after a phase of increasing export of US capital to Europe, a phase of increasing reciprocity in the export of capital began, the creation of joint subsidiaries (not only in the Third World) and the amalgamation of the largest banking and industrial groups around the world through a thousandfold network of holdings and cooperatives. After competitive capitalism and old imperialism, the third stage of the capitalist system has been reached, multinational imperialism, or globalism!


"One World" of Dead Souls


This new type of imperialism created globalist instruments to coordinate its activities and gain complete control over all the peoples of the world. These instruments include:


- NATO and friendly/allied pacts such as SEATO, ANZUS, etc. as military instruments of domination.


- The World Bank and the infamous "International Monetary Fund" (IMF) as the central levers of global economic control, which have brought almost all the nations of the world into dependence through their lending policies and all manner of financial manipulations.


- Associations such as the "Trilateral Commission", "World Economic Forum" and the "Bilderberg Conference" as consultative bodies of important state, economic and trade leaders, media representatives etc. from the Western industrialised countries.


The goal, the "One World" controlled by inscrutable multinational globalist bodies is now within their grasp! It is not the result of an ominous "world conspiracy", but results from the development logic of capital (which was never understood by the right-wing parties; the reason why they had to resort to mystifications of conspiracies to explain simple processes). The interdependence of capital increases day by day, as does the dependence of the peoples on the decisions of the IMF and the big banking centres. For the sake of higher profits, the importance of capital utilisation cries out for globally standardised production processes, consumer behaviour, ways of life; for global psychological calculability and thus for the disappearance of all mental and cultural differentiations.


This 'brave new world' of the multinationals will be a world without cultural diversity, without national sovereignty and regional autonomy, without democratic decision-making and without workers' rights. It will be planned and structured down to the smallest detail, realising Ernst Jüngers' chilling horror vision of "planetary planned landscapes". It will reduce the human being to the functions of production and consumption, it will leave no room for individuality, creativity outside the global culture industry and no self-determination for the people. Its supreme principle will be the rationality of capitalist profit. Their ideologies are - even now - liberal cosmopolitanism, progressivism and the idolisation of industry and technology. Their archenemy is and remains: NATIONALISM!


Class Struggle as Revolutionary Task


If nationalism is anti-capitalist, it must finally free itself from the reactionary imagination of the political right. This means, above all, that all ideas of the "peoples community" (volksgemeinschaft) and "national solidarity" under the umbrella of the capitalist system must be definitively rejected. For the people are divided into the stooges of imperialism and its ideologies, on the one hand, and those who suffer and partly fight against imperialism, on the other. This division is - from its objective causes - a division into social classes since the basis of imperialism is determined by one class alone, namely the capitalist class from whose womb it emerged.


The class struggle is therefore not a Marxist "instrument of division" against the people, but exists objectively and is perceptible every day in the conflicts between the different social classes. Today, more than ever, it is the task of true national revolutionary politics to make people aware of this class struggle, to intensify it and to orientate it.


The beneficiaries of the imperialist system in each country are the direct representatives of the multinationals, the directors, commissioners and managers of the respective banks and companies, as well as their accomplices in political parties, trade unions, the media and the cultural sector. The deceived are the broad strata of the people, the workers who have been deprived of their identity and culturally enslaved. They are economically exploited and politically impotent. It is necessary to persuade these misled people to fight against the globalists. This can be done on the basis of the objectively existing economic contradictions, which have become increasingly evident in recent years.


The economic contradictions of the working class in particular against the capitalists have been elaborated excellently by Karl Marx: the workers produce surplus value which the capitalists appropriate. The producers are thus deprived of the fruits of their own production. Moreover, in the capitalist production process they are constantly exposed to the constraints of profit maximisation for the capitalists, with all its consequences: rationalisation, high work pressure, industrial accidents and waste of personal labour power. In times of crisis, the capitalists and their state withdraw previous social concessions, resulting in poverty and impoverishment. From these contradictions arises an anti-capitalist potential for conflict, which can manifest itself in daily small-scale wars in the factory, but also in mass actions of the workers, employees, etc. on the streets. That is where the national revolutionary struggle can and must begin!


Imperialism is based on a system of continuous industrial production, creation of surplus value, reinvestment, increased production, etc. The bearers of production are the workers, without whose labour there would be no existence. The carriers of production are the workers, without their labour the system could not exist. There can be no war in the world without weapons produced by the workers. No ship, no aeroplane, no car is available, no electricity flows through the wire without the power of the labourer. Thus the worker has in his hands the weapon to pull the rug out from under imperialism and thereby liberate both himself and the nation, the people. The sharpening of the antagonisms between the exploited and the exploiters, the raising of the class struggle to a higher level, can lead to the working class refusing to work in one country or another and thus attacking the basis of the system. Political strike, general strike, factory occupation are thus among the main instruments of the class struggle, which must ultimately lead to the national liberation struggle.


The political-strategic awareness of the link between personal suffering and the imperialist world system arises no more or less spontaneously today than it did 80 years ago, when Lenin, in his writing "What to do?", pointed out the necessity of the link that the spontaneous (economic) workers' movement must make with revolutionary theory. The lever for establishing this link is the revolutionary organisation, the creation of which is an increasingly urgent task for national revolutionaries.


It is the workers and the other simple layers of the people who have every interest in freeing themselves from this system, which means social liberation from the capitalist economic system and thus liberation from the imperialist world system. The bourgeoisie, on the other hand, is today anti-national to the bone (and that means, above all, liberal), because everything it has to lose after a socialist workers' revolution, it has gained through this globalist system. This also applies to the much-quoted 'small', 'medium' and 'anti-monopoly' capitalists, even now that their days are numbered due to the wave of bankruptcies. What is overlooked, however, is that these capitalists also benefited to the end from the ruling system, which guaranteed them private ownership of the means of production, protection from exploitation and, in most cases, a decent living. They are allies of the system and not of the people; for the sake of profit they have always been prepared to betray their nation. One cannot serve both the moneybags and the nation. Individual pursuit of profit is liberalist behaviour and service to the nation is socialist behaviour (the former characterised by individual, the latter by collective interests); both are mutually exclusive.


Conclusion:


Capital has now organised itself internationally and is striving for the completion and unification of the world. The struggle for the preservation of peoples and cultures as a national revolutionary task must therefore be directed against international capital, globalism. Nationalism is thus an anti-capitalist struggle; a class struggle!


National revolutionaries must recognise the objectively existing contradictions between the workers and the capitalist system and mobilise the enormous power of the working class for the national liberation struggle. They must make the workers aware that social liberation cannot be achieved without national liberation, the task of which is to liberate one country after another from world capitalism. The escalation of the class struggle is in no way directed against the interests of the nation, but rather serves them. If capital today is internationalist and its ideology globalist, then the working class as a counterpart of capital must be nationalist (in the sense of anti-imperialist solidarity of the people fighting for liberation). And vice versa: the class struggle of the workers against capital is directed against an internationally intertwined power and thus benefits the liberation of the peoples from this power!


NO NATIONAL LIBERATION WITHOUT THE LIBERATION OF THE WORKING CLASS!


NO SOCIALISM WITHOUT THE LIBERATION OF THE NATION AND THE RECONQUEST OF NATIONAL IDENTITY!


PEOPLES OF THE WORLD, UNITE IN THE STRUGGLE AGAINST GLOBALIST CAPITAL - NATIONAL LIBERATION EVERYWHERE!



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