The real essence of capitalist globalisation is no longer a secret: its simply that of exploiting the labour and natural resources of the entire world for the benefit of international large-scale capital holders based in. the USA, Europe and Japan, the governments of which have duly prepared the most powerful and criminal military machinery that the world has ever known.
The mechanism of international loans and multinational investments, accompanied by warlike activities against any popular rebellion (be it in Iraq, Yugoslavia or Palestine... ), ensures the gamering of every crumb of profit in all of the comers of the world, and its transfer to the financial marketplaces of the West in order to benefit an increasingly smaller and richer grand bourgeoisie and its financial institutions. These markets not only systematically strip small savers (attracted by the possibility of sharing in the profits) of whatever they have, but also oblige workers to accept that a large part of their wages and indirect income (pensions, health insurance, etc.) is directly related to the profit and stock market trends.
In the case of workers, this financial robbery is insultingly accompanied by an exponential increase in the direct robbery of their working energies: they are forced to accept lower salaries or seek other lower-paid jobs, and the paroxysmal lengthening of working hours means that their physical and psychic lives are inhumanly consumed by bestial production rhythms that provoke stress and an increase in working accidents -all of which leads to increasingly neurotic and conflicting social and family relationships.
Growing numbers of small agricultural and industrial entrepreneurs, who thought that the construction of their own businesses would enable them to escape exploitation, find themselves ruined by usurious interest rates (legal and illegal), as well as the burden of the taxes and duties they (but even more dependent employees) have to pay their insatiable governments in order to sustain large national industrial and banking groups, and feed modern and super-equipped armies and other militaristic organisations for internal "security", not to mention a plethora of state employees often dedicated to the most useless and parasitic occupations. At the same time, they also experience the real meaning of market dictatorship: after having been pushed to continue increasing their productivity levels, they now find themselves presented with the bill of over-production to be eliminated or a production that has been obtained in a way that is actually dangerous for consumers, such as the effects of BSE. Women are discovering that the decades of struggle spent in gaining their emancipation are being made vain by an increasingly dual-natured oppression: the work that they are forced to do (under conditions that continue to be worse than those experienced by their male counterparts) in order to support their families, and their families themselves for whom their work of care, instead of decreasing, is becoming even more necessary and oppressive because of the growing need to provide the few things that the State once took responsibility for (but from which it is now withdrawing everywhere) and the fact that they have to play their role of psycho-affective support under conditions made worse by the growing difficulties of social life, especially for the young. Further, the devastation of human values caused by the increasingly invasive logic of profit has given rise to a response that has exacerbated the role of women as objects of pleasure on which to off load the impulses of a sexual life that has been made so inhuman as to cause the spread of violence against women and encourage the equally inhuman practice of paedophilia.
The peoples of the Third World see their hopes of progress turning to ashes, and the capital borrowed to finance their development has become the new ball and chain by means of which the IMF, the World Bank, the banks and Western States subject them to a slavery that is even more abject than that of old-style colonialism. The social relationships already overwhelmed by the enforced spread of the capitalist system are now being threatened by another hard trial: an increasing number are being forced to emigrate to the imperialist countries, where they have to confront the inferno of a life of stent in the hands of new slave-traders who exploit their condition of need (after having created it by pillaging the resources of their countries, and by means of their loans and so-called "aid") and confine them in social ghettos, using the blackmail of expulsion to deny them any political rights and prevent any collective reaction of struggle or organisation.
In brief, the capitalist production system finalises the possession of the entire world and allows the more powerful States increase their differential of wealth and power.
The populations of the countries oppressed by imperialism feel the weight of this rapidly expanding exploitation and oppression at first hand and, even in the imperialist countries, the social classes living only on the basis of their own labour (sometimes supplemented by a small capital) are beginning to realise that their lives cannot go on as before except at the cost of an endless increase in their efforts to work and save, and growing anguish concerning the security of their jobs and life in general because of the risks of accumulating environmental disasters and the unnatural course of social relationships.
Here and there, the effects of this further turn of the screw are beginning to give rise to the first significant moments of rejection and revolt also in the imperialist West: European cattle breeders bedevilled by the overproduction of milk or the spread of "mad cow" disease; hauliers struggling against the rising fuel prices that threaten to undermine the fiscal charges of the State; the young people of the new economy in Europe and the USA who are giving life to the first struggles against the working deregulation of which they are the main victims; the women organising a world march against poverty and violence; the immigrants beginning to experiment forms of struggle and organisation; the anti-paedophilia movement in Belgium; the beginnings of the reorganisation of American trade unionism; the revival of the struggle of Afro-Americans .... and thousands of other more or less important episodes given more or less media attention. These are not yet large-scale and powerful movements, but they do offer the first signs of an awareness that the time has come to "do something", and that it is no longer possible to stand by in the face of the disasters in course or the even worse disasters in store. It is the time for self-mobilisation and self-organisation, without placing any reliance on (but resolutely fighting against) the State powers that are nothing more than the simple tools of capitalism and imperialism.
These initiatives are generally directed against individual and specific effects of globalised capitalism, but they also contain the seeds of an awareness that no single question can be solved without confronting the unitary nature of all of the questions as a whole. What has so far been the highest expression of this awareness was the Seattle demonstration (see article inside), which brought together workers and ecologists, agricultural workers of the First and the Third World, and antiglobalisation organisations of the most varied types, thus underlining the fact that all of the individual initiatives can and must be unified in a single, concentrated and centralised struggle against their powerfully concentrated and centralised common enemy.
Since then, none of the summit meetings of international financial bodies, States or corporations dominating the world has been allowed to pass in silence, but has had to face a composite movement determined to disturb it and denounce its programmes and policies.
The fact that this happens and continues to happen is a highly positive and important fact. However, its simple continuation is not sufficient for the forces that understand the need to undertake a real battle and do not want to be transformed by the ritual of "counter-summits", a risk that is facing the various tendencies of particularly the European "left". It is for this reason that we have to draw the due conclusions from the results of the battles waged so far, and confront the problems that have emerged from them. The questions that now need to be faced by every anti-globalisation militant are What should be the final aim of the battle. and how should it be conducted?
The majority of the people who have mobilised themselves over the last few years have done so with the aim of blocking the current process of globalisation or at least blunting some of its more aspects. The logic is one of stopping time in such a way as to preserve the capitalism they have known so far and prevent its transformation along the emerging; lines of its globalising effort, This drive. is not only manifested by an `opposition left'' that would make do with the preservation of the "old-style" capitalism it once wanted to reform, but also by those sectors of the right that actively support ethno-capitalist programmes that foresee the (illusory) creation of small nation States, whose borders would be protected against the effects of globalisation and which would have a less explosive social organisation in terms of "internal" class relationships. Even the so-called "extreme" left (which in Italy, for example, is based around "social centres") operates according to the same logic, being convinced that it can slow down globalisation, condition State acrd financial institution policies (by "imposing" compromises). and maintain its a-globalised islands.
The "programme for the reform of capitalism'", which was buried by a left that was so definitively submissive as, to accept the direct management of capitalist interests every where this involved the use of war (as in the case of the war against ex-Yugoslavia conducted by European "left-wing" governments), now reappears in an even more moderate form the "near" left and the "new" right are birth dedicated to defending capitalism, and the slavery it imposes on the metropolitan proletariat and the peoples of the Third World (and which it imposed even before the era of globalisation).
But what needs to be clearly written on our banners is a programme designed to destroy rather than reform capitalism, the programme of a society that will abolish profit and all of the means that make it possible money, markets, the State and all of its "democratic" or "dictatorial" control and command systems, and class divisions. In this way. it will be possible to develop conditions in which individual and national relationships are no longer dominated by competition and weir, but based on criteria governing a truly humane community: i.e. communism.
The European "opposition left" and ethno-nationalist right are strangely united by their common view that the "old-style" capitalism they seek to preserve is a "different", more humane and less conflict-ridden European capitalism, brat this is absolutely false because they fail to take into account the fact that this capitalism has become increasingly "Americanised" as a result of the adoption of policies (also followed by "socialist" governments" that destroy all of the previous conquests of the workers. They do not seem to understand that it was the colonial policies of European capitalism that gave rise to current imperialism, equipped with the even more powerful and criminal means demanded by modern society. This can be seen above all in the fact that European capitalism participates equally with its North American counterpart in the current imperialist pillaging of the world, also taking upon itself the responsibilities of war. Declaring this non-existent difference only serves to prepare the ground (knowingly or otherwise is of little importance!) for opposition and even more open competition between European and North American imperialism - a repetition of the attempt made by Nazism and Fascism to involve the proletariat in the inter-imperialist war against the Anglo-American plutocracies in the name of a "proletarian" Germany and Italy.
It is therefore a question of the destruction of capitalism, not the promotion of reformed capitalism or even less that of a European capitalism in contrast to an American capitalism. But is it possible to destroy capitalism without the mobilisation of the class that is the main victim of its production and social system, and whose condition condenses that of all humankind -without the proletariat determining to fight against capitalism by joining the battle in its capacity as a politically and economically organised class for itself, and its immediate and historical interests, and for this reason reappropriating its own programme and its own communist party?
It is true that the proletariat (particularly that in Europe) is disoriented and disorganised. Decades of struggle and organisation on the basis of a programme aimed at reforming capital have meant falling into the hands of the companies, the market and the State. The political corruption caused by reformism has been so effective because it has been accompanied by economic and social corruption. The often hard-fought proletarian "conquests" were also made possible by the fact that imperialism could concede the metropolitan proletariat some of the crumbs of the profits made by exploiting the oppressed countries without this giving rise to any particular reasons for crisis. But today, such "concessions" are becoming increasingly difficult for both European and American capitalisms, which are becoming less susceptible to "reform" and have started withdrawing all of their previous concessions one by one. The new forces enrolling in the proletarian ranks (the young, women and immigrants) are no longer immediately granted hardly any of the previous "guarantees", whereas both the new and the old proletariat have to spend their lives in sustaining increasingly high production rhythms and wars of conquest made or in the making.
The ground for a recovery of class conflict on the part of both the "new" and the "old" proletariat is therefore being fertilised by capitalism itself, but it is crucial that the explosion of objective contradictions is accompanied by a subjective restoration of class organisation.
Everybody who feels the need to for a real struggle without falling into the illusion of being able to halt globalisation while preserving capitalism, and who does not want to see this struggle transformed into an empty ritual, must therefore be prepared for a battle and commitment aimed at re-establishing the proletarian struggle and autonomous class organisation capable of sustaining and unifying all aspects of resistance against the effects of globalisation by centralising them in a single programme designed to destroy capitalism and imperialism.
Capitalism is increasingly unifying the world on its own terms, and this offers exceptional potential to the struggle of the proletarian and communism. There has never before been such a possibility of welding together the struggle of oppressed peoples against imperialism and that of the metropolitan proletariat to free itself and all humanity from the increasingly malignant cancer of the capitalist system which, like any vampire seeking to preserve its life, is perfectly prepared to precipitate environmental disasters throughout the world and destroy human life by means of starvation, misery and devastating wars.
The only way to contribute towards the final end of this rottenly murderous system, to strengthen and unify all of the existing struggles against it, and to create new and more powerful movements is therefore that of working to organise a vanguard that can lead the battle inside all of the movements and towards every contradiction they manifest, channelling them into a process of struggle whose bold and uncompromising battle cry clearly declares that capitalism must be destroyed down to its very foundations and that, in order to be truly human (and therefore truly social), human society must rid itself of a system which claims to give life but actually does nothing other than produce suffering and death.
A vanguard and a world communist party to support and extend the struggles of the metropolitan proletariat, and works to unify them and the boundless masses of the oppressed continents in a straggle against the imperialist States that starve them with international debts, blackmail them with threats of military reprisals, and attack them with their armies at the first signs of insufferance against the world order decided in Washington and European capitals for the good of stock exchanges and all parasitic classes.
We are against every summit of the international brotherhood that dominates and oppresses the entire world, but we are working to develop the struggle against every instance of this dominion and oppression.
Not only when they discuss the broad lines for ensuring their profits, but also when they put their ides into practice, when they strangle individual countries with their "structural adjustment", when they bomb rebellious peoples as in Iraq and Yugoslavia, or when they support the massacre of Palestinians by the State of Israel. When they exploit the immigrants and confine them to ghettos, branding them as uncivilised and "backward", or when they extend the deceitful charity of those who declare a wish to help them come to terms with "our civilisation" and "our rules": i. e. passive acceptance of being exploited. And when they increasingly enslave women with their double oppression.
We are fighting to promote the a trade union and political reawakening, and a return to the struggle of all of the working class, all of the classes who live on the fruits of their own labour and find themselves robbed by industrial and financial profit.
We are fighting to allow the proletariat to take on once again the task organising themselves a class, equipping themselves with their own party, gathering and unifying every ferment of struggle against capitalism in order to defeat it and open up the road to communism.
Also read our article on the lesson of Seattle