SENZA CENSURA N.16

march - june 2005

EDITORIAL

"The USA want a strong Europe, because we need a solid partner in the hard task of spreading freedom in the world"
(G. W. Bush, Statement at the Club Concert Noble in Bruxelles, 21.02.2005)

The show of global capitalist rule started 2005 with appointments expected to be "solving", filling all the medias with propaganda. In January there were the contested presidential and municipal elections in Palestine, the Social Forum in Porto Alegre and the farce elections in Iraq; on 20th February the farce consultative referendum in Spain to ratify the so-called European Constitution and, after some days, Bush's visit to EU and Russia's rulers, prepared by Condoleeza Rice, the new Undersecretary of State.
All the medias confirmed that, if not everything is ok, certainly it's all for the best. This in spite of what the local Italian Left tells about "potential inter-imperialist conflicts" between the two banks of the Atlantic.
Instead, the whole of these "pacific" events hide a process (unprecedented for extension and deepness) of international crisis of the capitalistic way of production which the editing of Senza Censura since years indicates to be a central element in the development of class struggle for the international proletariat.
In this historical process they are emerging and will emerge the real system's hierarchies into the whole of superstructures of imperialist bourgeoisie's global rule. And in these circumstances the international proletariat has got the alternative to elaborate, express and practice when and how possible an autonomous initiative of class about the matter, or to reach an agreement with the "claims" of some part of imperialist bourgeoisie (maybe demanding "social provisions" of safeguard for market's conditions by this last decided).
At the same time we often underlined how the opening of new confrontations between bourgeoisie and proletariat like counter-meetings, beyond various attempts to make them spectacular, should have led to unwanted (even by bourgeoisie) results in case of massive participation by the whole proletariat (the metropolitan one included).
From this point of view, significant is the example of the so-called "movement of movements". It's leaders, unable to lead autonomous mass mobilizations of metropolitan proletariat, clearly disconcerted by backward political positions emerged during the World Social Forums in Asia and South America, mortified in the aspiration of becoming "global leaders" of an international movement against globalization, recently they declared exhausted the "propulsive incentive" deferring to an activity of "struggle to Aids, for fair and solidly trade, for the cancelling of poor countries' debt" (Vittorio Agnoletto, 21.01.05).
Lost a movement which wanted and wants to put on discussion the capitalistic way of production and its local and "global" political structures, they are trying now to participate in the building of an improbable "Social Europe", benevolent regulator of "unequal and warlike" international relationships among rich and poor countries.
But this aspiration too is destined to be unsatisfied or to take the form of a "pacific activism" of metropolitan proletariat under someone else's flag.
The "contested" Bush's doctrine, with its military interventions in terms of "preventive defence" and "global war to terrorism", was and is a mere concrete application of NATO's "new strategic concept" elaborated during the Washington meeting in April 1999. Naturally, the present conditions of relationships between social classes all over the world and the oscillation of power among old and new imperialist powers, have led the leading imperialist country to take the political and military initiative, with the aim to lead the general process of re-alignment of imperialist hierarchies.
But, beyond some media clashes like the failed Conference of Donor Countries to re-build Iraq (Madrid, 23-24 October 2003), the so-called "transatlantic family" knew and know perfectly that it's necessary an alliance based on two economic and political-military pillars to counterbalance two emerging continental powers (China and India). As we underlined yet in November 2003, if this implies the acceptance by EU of the global role of NATO (yet sanctioned in Prague's meeting), it implies also a more concrete definition of the political-military potential and of the decisional autonomy of the European imperialist pole: "With the NATO war in Kosovo the leading imperialist country re-affirmed its decisional autonomy into the Euro-Atlantic Alliance; with the Iraqi war it's the constituting European imperialist pole to look for its own common foreign policy and its own "Monroe doctrine". Doing this it looks for allies everywhere: among the USA or among new emerging powers, as among its own classes and oppressed peoples" (Senza Censura n. 12).
On the other hand, the principal actors of bourgeoisie's global show directly try to confirm these expectations.
In the press conference at the end of the NATO meeting in Bruxelles (22.02.05), confirming the intention to give a greater political importance to the Alliance like "consulting and coordinating forum" between USA and Europe about safety, Bush assured that "the relationship between USA and Europe is necessary and important and NATO is the basis of this relationship", while Chirac said that "European defence is increasing and this means an opportunity for NATO, because a stronger and more united Europe means a stronger and more efficient Alliance".
Besides, being clear since the beginning that every short-term investment in the Iraqi area could not be led directly by the USA military administration and, in the short-term perspective by the future puppet government , they assured the next "democratic development" of Iraq substituting the improbable solving action of the "Quartet" (USA, Russia, EU, UNO) with the proposal to realize a joined conference USA-EU about Iraq because, like observed the German chancellor Schroeder during the joined press conference with Bush at the end of the meeting hold at the Magonza Castle on 23rd February, "we can think about a solution of the Middle East crisis only with a strong involvement of USA".
In any case, to realize these aims it's necessary to accelerate the constitution of EU and its autonomous warlike potential inside NATO (the so-called ESDI) and an extended search of approval among European and Middle Eastern masses about these projects of "democratic re-building" of Europe, Iraq, and the whole Great Middle East. The electoral colleges put on by imperialist bourgeoisie in European and Middle Eastern countries have a common formal aim : to give constituting feature to the approval of small minorities (it's enough to think about the percentages of participation to vote in Iraq and Spain and the exclusion of Diaspora Palestinians).
But the war is going on and relatively wide sectors of the European proletariat yet express strong movements against masters' Europe: it was significant, among mobilizations against the abrogation of the 35 hours law, the recent position took by the great majority of the National confederal Council of the French CGT for a "no" campaign for the referendum about the European constitution which will take place in France within June 2005.
So, once more in front of dramatic developments of daily events in the near European abroad it's maybe important to confirm that militarism and wars, in the field of a process of concentration and centralization of capitals proper of the monopolist and imperialist phase of capitalism, are like the rain gushing from the cloud of the capitalistic way of production; and that still today the NATO military intervention in Iraq has got an immediate political weight relative to imperialist metropolis and it should be opportune, in the effort to re-constitute the class political autonomy all over the world, to oppose the consequence of this historical process in the "internal front" and in terms of worsening of formal and material conditions that more and more wide sectors are facing.