ENOUGH WITH THE DECEPTION AND BALONEY: DOWN WITH THE STATE OF EMERGENCY FOR THE IMPERIALIST WAR!
NO TRUST IN THIS STATE: OUT OF EUROPE, OUT OF NATO!
Only a few years ago, globalisation was celebrated as the rise of a new era of development and prosperity. Today, not a day goes by without capitalism showing its true face: economic crises, the impoverishment of the working class and the masses, biblical emigrations of populations reduced to starvation by multinationals and big banks, and so on. On top of it all, there is now the race towards World War III and, closely intertwined with it, the institution of fascism on a planetary scale.
The battle for a new partitioning of the world is a tendency inherent in the capitalist and imperialist nature of the various powers; first and foremost the USA and Europe on the one hand, and Russia and China on the other, who, day after day, aiming to conquer new spheres of political and military influence, new markets and new raw materials, are irreversibly upsetting a whole complex of delicate strategic balances, thus generating a competitive process that can only end in World War III.
In this context, Italy stands out for the grotesque contradiction between its aspiration to be amongst the best in class and its miserable reality as a semi-dependent country that in just a few decades has dissipated the core of its industrial system by ceding it to foreign powers and is now surviving on the fringes of the strongest imperialist countries, trying not to miss an opportunity to hurl itself into military adventures of all kinds in order to contend with its competitors for small areas of political-military and economic influence.
An Italy well represented by a general at the head of the alleged war against the coronavirus. Yet what the Italian state today seems to consider well done and even meritorious, i.e. putting a military man in charge of managing a health emergency, would have seemed an abomination to the liberals of the most advanced countries of the 19th century, who were well aware that too directly linking civil society and political society is always highly risky when it comes to managing the consensus of the ‘governed’. Moreover, all this is well attested by the disastrous end of Mussolini’s ‘ethical state’, which in a few decades sparked an anti-fascist popular war that seriously threatened to engulf Italian capitalism itself.
As is well known, however, it is difficult to learn from history, especially when the economic interests of the few at the expense of the many are at stake. And so today, we are seeing yet another chapter in Italian politics open up, the one concerning the extension of the state of emergency until 31 December. A few weeks ago, in view of the already foolhardy claim that the pandemic had become an endemic, the state of emergency was soon to be brought to an end. Today, however, the state of emergency is being renewed and extended, in fact indefinitely, in the name of the need to assist Ukrainian refugees. It is hard not to see the blatant scam that lies behind this.
What has actually been decided is an “extraordinary state of emergency” to secure the best possible conditions for a war mission that, this time, however, will involve directly taking on, alongside the other NATO countries, the US and Europe, the Russian imperialist power and, in the longer run, also the Chinese imperialist power. The last two years have provided a very clear illustration of what can be accomplished by declaring a state of emergency, with the de facto establishment, in alternating phases, of a bureaucratic military regime including the relative suppression of political, trade union and personal freedoms. All this, let us remember, was not to ensure a more effective fight against the pandemic, but to ensure that the semi-collapse of the healthcare system, with its criminal dumping of the same pandemic on the popular masses, would not spark a sacred generalised revolt. This bureaucratic-military model of approach to the health emergency thus came ever more dangerously close to that actually implemented in the USA in 2005, in response to the popular uprising that broke out in New Orleans, Louisiana, after Hurricane Katrine left tens of thousands to starve without any possibility of evacuating the city. The uprising was put down by killing the ‘looters’ on the spot and locking up 20,000 people without assistance or food in a stadium in the city.
And so the Italian state, all the while taking another step towards identifying “political society” with “civil society”, in other words another step towards the “ethical state” or more commonly speaking, “fascism”, has also thought to prepare a new mass shearing of Italian workers, increasing the cost of fuel, heating, electricity and basic necessities and making the usual taxpayers fund the weapons and military equipment supplied free of charge and in large quantities to the Ukrainian army, not to mention the various military drills ever more frequent on national soil. All this, combined with the sending of thousands of soldiers to the Ukrainian borders, many of them so-called elite troops and veterans of other “purely Italian” undertakings in Somalia, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya… and the closing of air space to Russia, as well as other horrendous sanctions such as the blocking of ATM cards for Russian tourists in Italy, censorship of conferences celebrating Russian history, culture and literature, etc. In short, a veritable declaration of war on Russia, in defiance of Article 11 of the Constitution and demonstrating that the Constitution is as good as waste paper when the reactionary ruling classes in Italy, linked to the interests of industrial and financial monopoly capitalism and the great rents, decide it is time to get rid of it.
Faced with this factual reality, trusting the propaganda and justifications put forward by this corrupt and decrepit State means putting oneself at the mercy of the wolf. There is no possible defence, no possible conquest without the direct, political and economic organisation of the proletariat and the most advanced elements of the popular masses and the small intellectuals.
However, none of this can be built, and therefore not even a real opposition to the imperialist war, without stepping away from the deceit and nonsense fed to us daily by this State and with it by the new holy alliance between fascists, social-fascists and hypocritical pro-NATO pacifists.
Only a democratic and anti-fascist government imposed through organisation and battle by a popular front made up of the working class, the exploited masses and small intellectuals can bury fascism and social fascism and stop Italian engagement in war policies.
Nuova Egemonia Blog
CONTRIBUTI TEORICO-POLITICI PER LA COSTITUZIONE DEL PARTITO MARXISTA-LENINISTA-MAOISTA 