Fear of war
Fear of unemployment
Fear of an ecological disaster
After the massive horror of the Twin Towers, we are now facing the specter of retaliation against Afghanistan by the first army of the world. We do not yet know what type of action Sheriff Bush and his administration will take. We can be assured, however, knowing the lack of delicacy the US army usually demonstrates in their operations of international police, that the local populations will be plunged into extreme distress, provoking directly or indirectly their death. To the thousands of unfortunate civilians killed at the World Trade Center and in Washington will be added many more new innocent victims not responsible for what is happening to them - or what will happen to them – in New York, in Pristina, or Baghdad. Barbarism follows barbarism.
For the carnages of September 11, the finger is pointing to the gang of Osama bin Laden.
It is very plausible that him or some other Islamic gang of terrorist, Shiite or Sunni, is responsible for the attack. The leaders of these movements deserve only our contempt. They present themselves as mystical gurus, obsessed with god. Are they really what they say they are? Or rather are they acting to better satisfy their appetite for personal power? It is not difficult to imagine, but even if they were sincere believers, we cannot forget that the people of the church, the synagogue or the mosque of yesterday and today have shown and will show again that they can be the bloodiest servants of the state, Islamic or others. We remember Khomeini, the extremist rabbis in Israel, and the genocidal priests of Rwanda.
Truly, these criminals – this is the name they deserve - take a big part of the population of the world hostage, presently Muslims who have been left outside of the industrial and technological civilization of capitalism. Of these people who die of hunger, misery, local wars, without a prospect for a future, powerless, these criminals have no regret in exploiting feelings of injustice and revolt. In Kabul, Jerusalem, Sudan, Egypt… bin Laden and his gang fanaticize these desperate individuals before transforming them into human bombs for suicidal and terrorist enterprises which have no future except for those so-called Islamic gangs that preach to them …This is the first level of responsibility but not the highest level.
The primary party, the executioner in charge of the deaths in New York and in Washington – or those that happened the same day in Palestine – is the world capitalist system. What provides the groundwork for the development of Islamic terrorism is the fundamental incapacity for the capitalist mode of production to manage, other than in a disastrous manner, the natural and technical human resources of the planet. For the past twenty years the development of Islamism is one of the illustrations of the incapacity of world capitalism to deepen the economic and ideological integration of vast regions. Since the economic crisis of the 80’s, we have even seen a regression of this integration in a big part of the world. It is because of this that all the cynicism contained in the antiterrorist “holy war” explodes like a bomb and Georges Bush, followed by his allies’ world wide, is leading today in the name of “justice, liberty and progressive values of the West”.
The terrorist, whom these hypocrites are now chasing, it is they, with the United States leading, who, yesterday, set-up, fashioned, formed and armed them. Osama bin Laden, at the time of the war between the Red army and the Afghan resistance, and even after, in the struggle between the Taliban and Massoud, has been used and protected by the United States. They, who provided high-tech weapons to the bloody Taliban, have closed their eyes on the regime of terror that these people exercised from Kabul on the population. Uncle Sam and its allies, western or Arabic, it is they who, in 1990, terrorized Saddam Hussein after giving him all the fire power imaginable in his war against Khomenist Iran, the first feud of this era, when the tyrant of Baghdad, seemed to be then, in the West, an interlocutor, of course lacking democracy, but a righteous drudge, even a little socialist (then leader of the baas party). No. We have no moral lesson to learn from these lying criminals. They want, they say, to abolish terrorism throughout the world. But terrorism of all time, especially in capitalism, is a constant tool of the interior and foreign politics of the States. In order to decree criminal laws against social agitators – that is how they phrase it - the capitalist leaders encourage terrorist attacks and even fabricate these attacks to the last detail. It was declared, for example, in 1969, that Italian security pulled the strings for the bloody attack of the piazza Fontana, in Rome, later blaming it on the anarchist’s.
About the WTC, we have been told to make a parallel with Pearl Harbor. Many commentators have made a hypothesis that the Pentagon was perfectly aware of the intention to bomb the American naval base at Pearl Harbor by the imperial army of Japan, but they let it happen because the White House needed a psychological shock in order to mobilize the people of the United States behind World War II. It is only a hypothesis, not a proof, but it is very logical with the State’s affairs. Same with the obscure affair, in 1964, some American ships that we thought were being attacked by the forces of the Vietcong’s general Giap: was the argument that US president Lyndon Johnson used for the intervention of American GI’s in Indochina.
All the capitalists’ states truly are the real terrorists. When terrorism originates from less powerful states or from movements, which aspire to state control (see IRA, ETA, nationalists Corsican mafia, etc.) it is stigmatized by the bigger states that condemn the expertise its inferiors have with weapons of terror. What? Vile attacks on the twin towers of lower Manhattan? Odious, of course, but is it more terrorist than the atomic bombs on the non military but civilian cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Than the phosphorus bombs thrown by the English RAF on Dresden in 1945? Than Hitler’s concentration camps? Than the gulags of Stalin? Than the attacks on villages in Vietnam, wiped out by the US Air Force? Than the socialo-liberaliste France (or vice versa) when it gave the tubs to collect the genocidal blood of Rwanda, in Zaire?
For what purpose are we using anti-terrorism in our beautiful “civilized” regions against bin Laden? In order to adopt measures to prevent the infiltration of foreign terrorists on “our” soil?
Yes, without a doubt, but especially to reinforce the already hypertrophied arsenal of the internal police force. And what is the intention? Outwitting Islamic agents? Maybe, but above all, to control the social expressions of the rebellion against the established bourgeois order. Are not many, eager to destroy, as Berlusconi in relationship to the “anti-globalizationers”, already spreading the idea that certain forms or radical critiques of capitalism can be compared to terrorism? Here is how they exploit without shame the victims of the Twin Towers. One of the more immediate manifestations of the association of Blair and others as Schroder or Chirac to the crusades of Bush has been the will of fortifying the famous European juridico-fliquesque.
Could there be only moral and just intentions in the military expedition in Afghanistan? Come on! Many other and more important motives exist. At least three:
-The establishment of durable military bases at the border of the Persian Gulf and in old Yugoslavia followed by the operation against Saddam Hussein, in 1990, and Milosevic at the end of the 90’s; the deployment of the US Army in Central Asia is probably the prelude to a solid military installation in this part of the world. The United States, who plays the arrogant role of world policeman, was not yet established there militarily even though it is an important region, in the proximity of four countries possessing nuclear arms: Pakistan, India, China and Russia, in contact with Iran and the republics of the south of the old USSR, seat of potential extremely complex conflicts.
-This same area by the Caspian Sea contains moreover very important oil beds, from which springs exploitation, notably the route of the pipelines, constituting precisely a source of nurturing the tensions of local states.
-Finally there is a third aspect to consider. It is the need of the United States to reaffirm, through a military expedition that they are the only ones capable to lead, the authority of first power of the planet in relation to the challengers who form the countries of the European Union. The United States cannot exclusively count on their economic force in order to establish their leadership. In the Afghani situation of today, as yesterday, as related to the Gulf, all the capitalists powers most certainly have a common interest to secure this zone to protect and encircle the oil derricks and, because of this, to support the military operations of uncle Sam, even though this reserves the high hand on the faucet of the black gold. Meanwhile, during this momentary consensus, the European power, Japan, China, India, etc., take every opportunity to play their own diplomatic or economic card and to try to minimize if not to contest the world supremacy of the United States. In this way new conflicts will appear inevitably.
Bin Laden and his like take hostage the populations of what was once called the third world. While this is true, it is not only there that an inequality exists, less glaring although real, is in the distribution of the fruits of the production of human labor. The less fortunate of the so-called capitalist eldorados are equally prisoners of the capitalist machine. Those who had barely time to collect some crumbs from the short preceding period of economic growth. Do they not see already the forebodings of the horror of a new recession? And here we have another bold capitalist usage of the attack in New York and Washington. The airplane-kamikazes are appointed to take responsibility for an economic recession, which at any rate, had arrived. Because of the Boeing crashers, the proletarians in the United States or elsewhere must accept sudden layoffs, to be thrown in the street, increasing the number of the marginalized, as a sign of devotion to the god Capital, as a sign of economic patriotism. We must consent to live our life in order to make the stock market happy. Disgusting!
What? The fight of the Western world against the Eastern? The combat of the good progressives
Against the evil retrogrades? Are you telling us that we should swallow this, what kind of imbeciles do you think we are? Here is the pest; there is the cholera, no choice to make between the plagues. The world is all capitalist and is everywhere unlivable. Even when we don’t die of famine, when misery hides in golden apparels, exploited workers on the stiff demands for work or unemployment, we are terrified. Overwhelming paradox, we are living in the middle of huge means of technology, a huge amount of sophisticated equipment, and even if we profit a little of the fruits of our labor, we are afraid of the intoxication from food, afraid of genetic experiments, of the mad cow, of aids and thousands of other operations that follow with the course of the uncontrolled buck of capitalism.
Illusively protected by technique, we are guinea pigs of the so-called accidents of yesterday, Seveso, Bhopal or Chernobyl and, today, Toulouse with more catastrophes coming in the future. Capitalism develops an incredible power of development, but is not in control of the forces that it engenders. Its flight, frantic and blind, condemns us to skid. We are living in fear, more and more concrete, as its anarchist excitement falls on our heads with a plane crashing with “surgical” precision on a skyscraper.
The state address has nothing more urgent or pressing to say or to repeat to us today than the “security of the innocent populations”. There is no security in capitalism. It is only a vast regime of social insecurity. This is the most certain globalization we can hope for from capitalism.
Humanity is facing a wall today, because its harmonious development demands a radical overthrow of the social order, the undertaking of the means of production by the producers themselves in order to satisfy human needs, not profit. This change is the installation of a world without borders, without states, without classes, without exploitation, without money. We call it communism knowing that it never existed, even if this word has been stained by the monstrous counterfeit of Stalinism.
This is a
revolution and, as such does not depend on individual will but on the action of
a social force that was produced by capitalism and represents its exact
opposite. This social force which is burdened by all forms of misery and
oppression of the system has nothing really to lose, and is a global force, not
ethnic, not national, not religious (Muslim, Jew, Christian or Buddhist). This
force can be for the whole of humanity, over and above countries and local
regions, for all those who have the same ways of earning their daily bread,
with the same ways of fighting against exploitation. This is the multitude of
proletarians, the only class capable of absorbing all the social, political and
cultural demands that categorize other exploited populations, from the United
States to Afghanistan: To unify them in one general anti-capitalist movement.
This force
has already shown in the past, in the Paris Commune of 1871, in Russia of 1917,
in Spain of July 1939, in 1968 in France in Poland in 1980 and the same in the
strikes of the oil workers of komenist Iran, in 1979, that it was potentially
capable of overthrowing or shaking the “bourgeois” state. It is still capable
of it.
Proletarians of the whole world, it is on us alone that the future of humanity rests with all the poor and other victims that capitalism encompasses. We will accomplish this task by clearly identifying ourselves as a class:
- No sacred union against terrorism behind “our” state: it is still more terrorist than the Islamic mafias. It is time for fear to change camps.
- No holy alliance with the capitalist’s bosses, no patriotic duty to save the national capital and the stock market. It is capitalism that explains the basis of Islamic terrorism and why we are again threatened, or condemned to go register at the unemployment office.
- No division between us. Our enemy is not the arab, jewish, european, afghan or american proletariat, but capitalism. We must not mistake the target, but direct our anger well.
- No middle way with capitalism. It is not reformable; it is not peaceful. Not even a hundred years and two world wars, a handful of colonial wars, the Russian-Afghan war, the war between Iraq and Iran and, in only the last twenty years: the Gulf war, war in the Caucasus, war in Bosnia, war between Pakistan and India, war in Kosovo…Is this not sufficient proof against the uselessness of the pacificist’s speeches? Capitalism is war (or terrorism): War on capitalism!
We have doubts about the double talk that they throw at us to justify the crusade against bin Laden. Let’s not ponder on these ideas alone. Let’s discuss them in two, in five, in 20, with the friends from work or in social places that cross your daily life. Let’s discuss the meaning of this text or others of the same spirit.
Des internationalists
Paris, le 5 Octobre 2001
Anarchist Federation