Volume Three
November 2022
Foreword Hassan Abbasi
Foreword
The war in Europe in 2022 became an excuse to once again place the entire burden of the global capitalist crisis and the costs of war, which are the inevitable result of the crisis, on the shoulders of the world’s workers. The skyrocketing increase in the prices of products and goods needed by the working masses in a large part of the capitalist world has led to the further spread of poverty, displacement, and the increase in the cost of living. In addition, the COP 27 conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, showed that the entire world of fast-paced, four-wheeled capital has thrown away all the illusions, promises, and agreements of its previous conferences and is rushing towards a world of turbulence and unparalleled competition that we only witnessed during the first and second imperialist wars. Wars, which themselves arise from capitalist crises and are their inevitable consequence, lead to a new arrangement of the spheres of capital, which is the result of the purification of some of the previously reserved spheres. From wars and during those techniques, new productivity of labour power emerges with unparalleled speed and evolves in the arena of unparalleled collisions and competition of the giants of capital and enters the cycle of production and circulation of capital.
Consider the recent wars between the three capitalist states of America and Israel and the Islamic Republic of Iran. Consider the paranoia of the leaders of these three powers. None of these leaders are capable of understanding the consequences beyond their own excesses. This is the nature of war, its necessity for the entire capitalist world is still a clear and obvious consequence of their policies, but the results of war are never controllable by them.
The US can only end the war against Iran at the cost of a strategic defeat – therefore, uncontrollable escalation is looming. Does it even make sense anymore to take note of the statements of the – well – President of the United States? Since the beginning of the Iran War, Trump has shifted his position almost hourly: from threats of escalation to declarations of victory, from speculation about withdrawal to insults directed at NATO allies. Virtually anything can be attributed to the president by citing this or that statement. The stream of mutually contradictory signals from the fascist borderline personality1 in the White House, whose erratic behaviour and pathological narcissism reflects the swelling irrationalism of capital brought about by the crisis, could simply be traced back to the fusion of psychopathology and fascist ideology in the – well – person of Donald Trump. Truth, reality, space-time, past or future – none of these seem to offer any reference point for his political reflexes anymore. All that remains is the “now-time” of the crisis, marked by intensifying shocks that fascism triggers and/or reactively amplifies. The talk of “alternative facts”2, which defined the beginning of the Trump era, has now reached its full expression.
Thus, war not only brings about a new refinement and arrangement of capital, but also throws into circulation a part of the accumulated surplus value that has wandered, destroying cities in order to open up new areas with plans larger than Marshall’s. Nevertheless, the current wars of about four decades have only resulted in the destruction of cities, the displacement of hundreds of millions, and the killing of millions of working masses, without revealing any aspect of the Marshall plans. World capitalism has reached such a stage of historical decay that it not only does not care about the environmental destruction and disasters resulting from its operations, but also uses wars as a means to destroy surplus and wandering capital, and only turns Damascus, Aleppo, the entire ruins of Syria, Beirut, Yemen, Afghanistan, parts of Iraq, and all of Latin America into ruins. A look at the latest decisions in Europe and America while drafting this introduction reveals the true, catastrophic and pitiful face that capital has painted for humanity. January 3, 2023 “NATO member states agreed on a new goal: their defence spending will increase to at least two percent of their economic output. This is only for peacetime, and defence spending cannot be lower than this. The member states of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) have long been arguing about increasing their defence budgets. Now, it seems, they have reached an agreement on a minimum. The initial goal is that by 2024, all countries will spend at least two percent of their gross national product on defence.” In this fierce competition, the Eastern part of European capital has turned almost all of Russia’s social capital into a war zone and is galloping towards a full-scale war. A look at the largest giants of military and mass destruction goods, in terms of capital composition (military and civilian), shows how huge capital monopolies are able to quickly change the cycle of production of goods from military to civilian and vice versa. As of 2019, with $2 trillion in arms sales worldwide (2.4 percent of global GDP), including 16 giants and large global capital-producing companies, what is in parentheses is the income from military production, and the rest is the production of civilian goods (civil goods):
First Lockheed Martin, the manufacturer of the F-35, with revenue of $52 billion in 2019 (89% of revenue), second is Boeing with $33 billion in sales this year (44% of revenue), third is the American company Northrop Grumman with $29 billion (86%), fourth is the American company Raytheon with $25 billion (85%), fifth is the American company General Dynamics with $24.5 billion (62%), sixth is the Chinese company AVIC with $22 billion (34%), The seventh is the British company Bayer Systems with $22 billion (95%), the eighth is the Chinese company Setec with $15 billion (46%), the ninth is the Chinese company Norinco with $14.5 billion (32%), the tenth is the American company Harris Technology with $14 billion (77%), the eleventh is the American United Technologies with $12 billion (17%), the twelfth is the Italian company Leonardo with $11 billion (72%), the tenth is the French-German Airbus Group with $11 billion (14%), the fourteenth is the French company Thales with $9 billion (46%), the fifteenth is the Russian company Almaz Anti with €9 billion (98%), and the sixteenth is the German company Rheinmetall with $4 billion (70%).
The following data (table from 2019 to 2021) is extracted from the annual reports of the Swedish Institute SIPRI. Surely, with the increasing share of European countries and the United States, other competitors including China, Japan, and India will not sit idle and planlessly waiting for fate in a turbulent and tense world with fierce competition to gain as much share of capital profit as possible from the average international profit rate.
As a result of the production of weapons and military equipment, military spending in 2022 has increased and made an unprecedented leap with the outbreak of war in Europe. It should be noted that the NATO decision on January 3, 2023, determined the minimum military budget of each country and considers this to be in peacetime because NATO, like Russia, does not see itself engaged in a war with Russia! The same NATO report states that some member countries have included more military quotas in their budgets than other countries. “Greece is at the top of defence spending: Among NATO members, Greece is ahead of other countries, allocating 3.76 percent of its GDP to defence spending. After Greece, the United States is next, allocating 3.47 percent of its GDP, which is equivalent to $822 billion (€768 billion). The fact that many small and medium-sized capitalists spend a larger portion of their budget on weapons and military equipment simply means that a limited number of large social capitals are the main producers of military goods, and a much larger portion of the world’s social capitals are the buyers of these goods. All this is happening in a situation where financial organizations and institutions of the world of capital, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, are making much bleaker predictions for 2022 for the world’s largest capitalist economies, namely Europe, America, and China, while Europe was plunged into a deep crisis and recession during 2022. Everything that has been and is being inflicted on working humanity during the life of capitalism, from war, poverty, displacement and migration from one land to another, to the increasingly catastrophic destruction of the environment, all spring from the infernal relations of capital. This is the fate that capital, the institutions of capital, and their governments determine for us. We, the workers, while we are the producers of all values, capital, and military and civilian goods, materials and goods harmful to nature and humanity, do not have the slightest involvement in what should be produced, the processes of production, or the consumption of goods. Capitalist governments always try to pretend that the root of the growth of regional and global wars, crime and crime lies in the nature of individuals, the criminality of some leaders and government management, and the purity and innocence of others. In a word, the root of the astronomical increase in even environmental destruction and the above-mentioned cases must be sought in human nature. They even seek the emergence of war crimes, the formation of militant fascist groups in all corners of the world, in places other than the existing dominant relations. Throughout the hell of capitalism, the vast majority of people are workers, the targets of capital’s ruthless exploitation, separated from their work and the fruits of their labour. A minority also owns capital and dictates the fate of work, production and the life of the working class. The root of the continuous growth of environmental destruction, war and crime, the ever-increasing production of means of mass destruction and the narrowing of the living conditions of the working masses, the daily increase in crime, theft and prostitution is the rule of the capitalist octopus system. The way things are is that capital, in order to reduce the effect of the fall in the rate of profit and compensate for it by the amount of profit, not only increases the intensity of work but also reduces the share of work in production (wages). Any struggle against the atrocities inflicted on us workers can only be pursued by opening a front against wage slavery. This is our battlefield against all economic and political intransigence. This is a long war in all spheres of social life, a war of all the workers of the world against capitalism, a war of the international working class against the system of wage slavery. This war requires preparation, equipment, organization, awareness and all the real requirements of radical class struggle. The identity indicator of this war is that it is anti-capitalist. It is a fight to determine the fate of one’s work, production, and life. Every step of victory in it, even if insignificant, is a step in consolidating the foundations of one’s anti-capitalist class power, a step in pushing back the bourgeoisie, in imposing one’s urgent demands on capital and the capitalist state, a step in reducing unemployment, slums, poverty, hunger, freedom-killing, criminal sexual discrimination, and environmental pollution. If we do not do so, the ensnarement of capital and the evil forces of fascism will rob us of the colourful essence of work and struggle and turn us against each other. This is a scenario that is currently being implemented and practiced in the heart of Europe, the Middle East, and many other regions of the hell of capital.
Chart 1 Data from the Stockholm Peace Research Institute (Sweden) SIPRI
The United States spent three times more on defence in 2020 than its two rivals, China and Russia, combined. According to a study, military budgets have reached a new record despite the coronavirus pandemic. Germany is in third place in Europe.