23 years ago, one of the most brutal war operations was launched by the USA & NATO against the people of Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia was a concrete symbol of the peoples’ anti-fascist victory in World War II and a unique variety of early socialism resisting the hegemony of Western capital. In accordance with the strategic aims of the Euro-Atlantic axis, this country had to be dismantled and its insubordinate people had to be punished. The brotherly people of Yugoslavia have paid dearly for their heroism and dignity. The losses in human lives and logistical infrastructure were huge.
It was another imperialist crime against humanity.
It was a warning of what the imperialists had in store for every country, for every people, for every movement that resists their thieving plans.
It was a bloody act at the first stage of the same war that is escalating today in the battlefields of Ukraine, in the volatile confrontation in Taiwan and on the Korean peninsula and in many other parts of the world.
The missile attack on the embassy of the People’s Republic of China on May 7th & 8th of 1999 foreshadowed the strategic aims and objectives of the US-led imperialist axis.
The communists and all progressive forces of humanity understood that US & NATO imperialist aggression and the destruction of Yugoslavia was a pivotal move, a general rehearsal for the further escalation of the war, with a clear objective, as far as the counter-revolutionary dissolution of the USSR had been achieved, to dismantle the largest, the most powerful remaining state formation, which could act as a centripetal force, as a pole of attraction and reunification of peoples and countries in the region: the Russian Federation.
The structural characteristics of the contemporary stage of imperialist globalization are highlighted in relation to verifying:
1) the present internal limit of the extensive development of capital, the modern form of the International Multisectoral Monopoly Groups, which subordinate the world to themselves,
2) the specific role of finance capital in the modern financial oligarchy, with the subordination of industrial capital to finance capital,
3) the upgrade of the intensive development of production through the new 3rd stage of the Scientific and Technological Revolution,
4) the changes in extensive and intensive development brought about by the waves of rise and fall of the early socialist revolutions from the 20th century to the present day and their interaction with the world of capital,
5) the completion of dividing the world among transnational monopoly groups according to inequality and extraction of monopoly super-profits on a global scale,
6) the rapid shift of power due to the rapid progress of the People’s Republic of China, the emergence of a new pole led by the latter and Russia (BRICS and so on) and the consequent shrinking ability of the traditional imperialist centers to parasitize on other countries,
7) the rapid increase in the aggression of US-led global imperialism.
The China and the alliances it forms with other countries in recent years, is having a catalytic and determining role in diminishing the ability of the US-led traditional Euro-Atlantic imperialist powers to parasitize by extracting wealth from other countries.
In this war, the current axis of aggression is becoming clearly defined, where despite the intense antagonisms between them, the countries of the three traditional centers of imperialism are finally rallying together:
1. the North American one, led by the USA,
2. the Western European one, led by Germany and
3. the Far Eastern one, led by Japan.
The driving forces and interconnected components of the global revolutionary process now become the following:
1. the working-class movement of the capitalist countries,
2. the countries of early socialism (victorious early socialist revolutions) and
3. the anti-imperialist-anti-colonialist movement and the countries that emerged from its revolutionary victories.
The defeat/counter-revolution in the USSR and in the European early socialist countries in no way constitutes a total defeat and disappearance of early socialism from the planet, nor a “definitive and irreversible defeat of the world revolutionary movement”.
The ongoing World War III is drastically sharpening, bringing to the surface, and highlighting in relief the contradictory nature of the making of historical development, the geotectonic shifts of power on a global scale, the retreat of the US-led frontline countries of imperialism and the upgrading of the pole that de facto constitutes the early socialist countries together with states and coalitions of states that emerged from anti-imperialist and national liberation movements.
This war is also a conflict between the parasitic imperialist rentier countries (dominated by the virtual capital of the financial oligarchy) and the countries that produce goods necessary for humanity.
This war – especially on the fronts of Ukraine and the post-Soviet space as a whole – also takes on the characteristics of a civil (political-class) war, since imperialism aims at further division on the basis of the imperialist practice of “divide and rule”, or – from the other camp – the escalation of tendencies towards coalescence, reunification and reintegration, with the remaining and relatively strengthened last state formation within which huge natural resources and elements of the most substantial legacies of the USSR are preserved: army and weapon systems, industrial infrastructure, research and advanced technology and – above all – a people with education and culture that is steeped in anti-fascist and socialist traditions.
This war also takes on anti-fascist characteristics, insofar as the attacking Euro-Atlantic axis, establishes fascist/racist type or overtly fascist-Nazi regimes, as instruments and strongholds of its aggression. Typical is the case of the Nazi regime currently holding power in Ukraine.
The deniers of the existence of socialist countries of our days, in general:
1. Are neither willing nor able to approach in terms of understanding and solidarity befitting comrades, the unprecedented difficulties and contradictions that the peoples of socialist countries are called upon to face heroically under extremely difficult conditions, nor their unique achievements, and
2. Are unable to realize the law-governed contradictory nature of revolutionary transformations and the necessity of commodity and monetary relations in socialism, the historically determined specificity, contradictory position and role of these relations at various stages of the rise and fall of the course of socialist construction.
A concrete historical investigation of the making of communism (including socialism) through the prism of its basic contradiction is therefore required: between formal and actual/substantial socialization of production/labor and society. Inability to resolve this contradiction creates conditions for counter-revolution.
Particularly in the conditions of rapid escalation of the ongoing World War III, it is impossible to diagnose the character of this war and of the forces and the camps which are involved in it, by those who are self-deluding themselves out of spite against the camp/pole de facto led by the countries of early socialism, headed by the P.R. of China, the countries and the forces of anti-imperialism and anti-fascism.
Today we find that the deniers of Socialism are at the same time deniers of anti-imperialism!
According to some people’s metaphysical prejudices, history has magically returned to the arbitrarily chosen starting point of their choice: the year 1914!
Through the acquis of Marxist-Leninist science of the political economy of imperialism, the deniers of imperialism are possessed by an unprecedented confusion of two related but very different SCIENTIFIC CONCEPTS:
a. the concept of “imperialism” as a historical stage in the development of capitalism; and
b. the concept of “imperialist country”, as a country whose monopoly groups and financial oligarchy provide a superior position in the inequality of the global capitalist system, global-scale overexploitation through the extraction of surplus value from the WORLD LABOUR CLASS and the WEAKEST CAPITALS (COUNTRIES, REGIONS, etc. etc.) in the form of MONOPOLY SUPERPROFITS, COLONIAL, NEO COLONIAL, etc. RELATIONS OF DEPENDENCE accompanied also by elements of INTERNATIONAL STATE DOMINATION (economic, political, military, etc.).
This confusion is linked to the elevation of all capitalist countries to “imperialist” status and a static-metaphysical conception of an “imperialist pyramid”, with all nation-states as its building blocks, as they are understood in the structuralist ideologemes and schemas of the “national socio-economic formations” proposed since the mid-20th century by L. Althusser and his followers…
Thus, the US lawmakers make a “Prohibition against furnishing assistance to communist countries” and a clear “enumeration of communist countries”: “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, People’s Republic of China, Republic of Cuba, Republic of Cuba, Socialist Republic of Vietnam, Tibet”.
Communists, progressive people of our planet, are today called upon to reflect on the consequences that any victory of the imperialist axis attacking under the USA could carry, not only for the revolutionary movement, but also for the very survival of humanity.
Therefore, it is the task of the revolutionary communist movement to take the lead in the consolidation of a world anti-imperialist and anti-fascist front today, in a struggle to crush the aggressor US-NATO-EU imperialist axis. In a struggle organically linked to the new “weak links” of the global capitalist system that are emerging and will continue to emerge by the escalation of the war and by the new waves of forthcoming victorious socialist revolutions (early and late).
The World Anti-Imperialist Platform is called upon to play a catalytic role in the organization, coordination, and victorious outcome of this life-or-death struggle for the revolutionary movement and for humanity itself.
