“There are all the prerequisites for a new World War. It would explode without hesitations, if it were not for Russian and American huge nuclear arsenals, and also for the smaller but equally terrifying ones, owned by the other powers. If a new world conflict is uncertain, the quotations of a big war or of a sequence of wars in the Big Middle East, from Indo-Pakistan border to Maghreb, are rising up and several factors seem to make it possible.”
(Sergej Karaganov, Limes n.2 – March 2013)
Edson Arantes do Nascimento –also known as Pelé -one of the best player that football has ever expressed, but also ambassador in the world of the military dictatorship in power in Brazil from 1964 to 1986, has found a way to renew the “jingoism”, that phenomenon of mass nationalist delirium, inter-classist as few others, that in football exalts, at the best way, its principal factors of fomentation, thanks to its ability of mimesis with situations not so different from war competitions;
these factors make it, just for that reason, a powerful mean of collective suggestion, used in the past by dictatorships such as the Fascist or the Nazis ones and nowadays by business-society, that has transformed it from “a free time unprofessional amusement in an avid and powerful industry, that is, in something that reinforces the acceptance of a more general social life naturally and unavoidably pervaded by the commercial spirit and money value.” [1]
So “O rey” in a country upset by protest waves and social disorders not more seen from the ‘80s, invites the demonstrators “to dedicate to cheer and not to the protest. Let’s forget all this disorder that shakes Brazil and remember that the Brazilian team is our country and our blood.”[2]
But of course Pelé’s idiocies do not wonder us; the matter is that they strongly clash with a social contest in which a laic religion such as football – at least it has been always lived in this way in Brazil – is openly brought into question. If on the demonstrators’ signs we most find: “-bola, + escola” or “- bola, + saude”, it is evident that there has been a short circuit because of pseudo values, myths, liturgies considered stabilized forever have collapsed.
But what is the cause or what are the causes giving birth to this more than intense social fibrillation? And more: what is there in common between the price increase of bus ticket in San Paulo and the trees cut in Gezi Park or the football rivalries and the consequent massacre in Port Said? And yet Brazil has known in all these years a strong GNP growth that, in the period from 2004 to 2011, passed from 500 billion dollars to almost 2.550, and this permitted, among the other things, an important reduction of misery beyond to the creation of a middle state and the relative inclination to consume.
But here we have to highlight this “middle state”, given that it is considered with an exaggerated emphasis by media in general and the Brazilian ones in particular; this rhetoric moves in concert with some economic analysts’ studies, that, in addition to preview the decline of the working class, have stressed, at the same time, the high expansion of the urban middle states and have been contradicted by the high expansion of the wage labor – signally in the so-called “world factories”, China, India and the other rising countries – concerning nowadays more than 2/3 of active population.
Whereas, just to be clearer, as the scientific direction of work as the Taylor’s system find application not only in the factory but also in office job, becomes a little more difficult going on to refer – as middle state – to the clerical job or to the old worker aristocracy.
In the Brazilian case it is also more strenuous because the middle state determination – the so called class C –would be given only from statistic indicators such as “family consumption”, “the total number of university students”, or “the education level of the head of the family”, head of the family who, however, with a middle income pf 1.350 reais (about 500 euro) is of course not able to access to private healthcare and he is forced to avail himself of the public one, that, like the transports and the school, are experiencing deplorable conditions.
This mythic “middle class” is mostly employed in the little industry, services and trade where the workday goes from 12 to 16 hours for 6 days a week, and it is for this reason that it is defined, in the Brazilian academic world, “the new precarious working class” inside the economic boom of the so-called “developing” Brazil. We must say that this boom has mostly come into being from “a politics aggressive towards the natural resources, the improve of the big industrial agriculture, that alone represents almost half of the GNP and the 40% of exportations, the agro-fuels and the livestock holdings” [3], a combination of factors producing a wealth that has mainly interested the businessmen of agro-business, the industrials, the banksmen and the lobby of private firms ruling public transports, with which – incidentally – the “left” Lula and Dilma Roussef have always avoided to confront, even more, the business categories whom we have referred – conservative and sometimes even reactionary – have always guaranteed their support to the so-called “progressive” governments, at the point that the last Minister of Economy of the military period, Delfim Netto, stresses very often how Lula has saved Capitalism in Brazil.
A boom, the Brazilian one – it is necessary to repeat it – founded on exportation of natural resources, mineral and agricultural ones, on which Brazil could finance its own internal demand.
Peculiar circumstances such as the speculative hike of international prices of the so-called “agro-food commodities” and the export of agro-fuels have even more made “virtuous” a country held up as a model, as “the world of the future” by the international business community and the specific international organisms.
If we consider the recklessness said about Argentina, the Asiatic tigers, Ireland, if we were into Brazilian shoes, we would do exorcisms.
It is true that Brazil was able to enter the group of the rising economies (BRICS) and how, thanks to this economic expansion of employed people, grew of 1,1%, while the unemployment rate, from 2009 to 2011, passed from 8,2% to 6,7%, but acute contradictions persist inside it and concern signally not only the parameters with which wealth is redistributed, but above all the social exclusion making it one of the most unequal countries in the world: a country where the high youth unemployment rate sums with 60% of population living under the poverty threshold while in the background there are the eternal nester oligarchies or phenomena such as the Caciquismo.
Contradictions that the government party (Partido dos trabalhadores – PT) has until now hidden through a plane based on a waterfall economy but with the axiom of a constant and speed growth, difficult to realize if we consider the nowadays international juncture.
Some dates: in 2009 the global crisis causes in Brazil a negative GNP (-0,3%). In 2010 it increases of 7,5% but in 2011 it decreases of 2,7% and then it reaches 0,9% in 2012.For 2013 an increase of 2,7% is expected, clearly conflicting with The Economist or Financial Times analysis, openly speaking about the crisis of the Brazilian boom and this hypothesis has nothing of peregrine if we only consider that the Brazilian economy is organically interconnected with the world economy, so a contraction in the demand coming from the USA or from UE countries fatally affects, negatively, exportations with a waterfall effect on its own social and economic components.
So, starting from the considerable stall of the Brazilian developing model, simultaneously with the stall of countries such as China, India, South Africa and others, today it assumes more value what Alessandro Penati writes on last 22th June’s “La Repubblica” about the FED intention to give a limit to the extraordinary measures of creation of liquidity: “…It means that it does not consider the American economy able to grow in a constant way on its own 2 feet for the next two years. This is a message more specifically meant to prepare markets, to reshape expectations and easy enthusiasms, than to mark a turning point in monetary politics. A message that is added to other worrying indicators:
1) The American job market, the nowadays most important macroeconomic indicator to value growth sustainability, is far from having found normality conditions. The unemployment decrease is explained by an increase of disheartened workers, who exit from job market. The relation between employed ones and population has in fact been fixed for 5 years.
2) The incentive of the speed increasing economies, the famous BRICS, could have consumed much of its strength. Big countries such as India and Brazil are leaving market politics and liberalizations to return to a government control incompatible with the past development rates. But the growth decrease enlarges social disease, that feeds the government control, which in turn reduces the growth.” [4]
After all, dates speak a very clear language: for the entire last decade we saw a very strong GNP growth that then fell down vertically in 2012 (0,9%).
If this was not sufficient, we can add that, for what concerns the year 2013, the “soothsayers” forecasts were lowered three times.
But it is not all, because we have to adjoin to this framework, already serious on its own, an inflation rate of about 6,5%, that, consequently, damages large population levels with a huge price increase.
On the other hand, when economic indicators mark a negative trend, someone must pay the consequences, and of course the politic and economic elites will not do it.
It is from such a context that a massive contestation begins which active subject is a movement made up of workers, unemployed, young occasional workers, students, small businessmen always more suffering because of the deterioration of their conditions of life, even ore worsened by social service lacks, corruption, money wastefulness in enormous works.
A movement, it is good to stress it, with interclass connotations that, at least until now, did not indicate the anti-capitalistic antagonism as its own peculiar code.
In a perfect harmony, after all, with every “springs” preceding it.
Square Taksim and the new sultan
Two factors give essentially continuity to the Brazilian and Turkish demonstrations: a fast economic growth coexisting with a likewise huge social inequality with the relative marginalization phenomena of large segments of social classes.
Moreover, there are some Turkish peculiarities involving the birth of this economic boom, so that it is indicated – how could this definition lack? – as “Turkish model”, speciously emphasized to contain in appropriate shadows all the distortions, the contradictions carried by such a development model.
In a country characterized by a polarization of society, persisting in spite of the country secularization wanted by Kemal Ataturk in 1923, that today reverberates its effects on an internal situation characterized by “an high pitched contrast between the traditional economic elites and a new business class affiliated to the AKP. Grown thanks to the small and medium firms, the new elites concentrate themselves around organisms such as Musiad, one of the biggest businessmen association, sponsored by AKP.” [5]
It helps to remember that AKP (Party for Justice and Development) is a party organization into which several Islamic tendencies flow and that, just for this reason, it cannot weaken its religious profile without risking to lose the Islamic electorate approval.
The current premier Erdogan, convinced Islamic conservative, “has succeeded to transform progressively the Party for Justice and Development into a ‘take-all’ Party, able to put together pieces of society with different interests and values, asking essentially for normalization and modernization. The victory in three consecutive elections has allowed him to reduce the weight of the counter-powers safeguarding the State secularity: the military, the judiciary and the bureaucratic ones, in the past efficient actors of interdiction of the birthing Islamic power.” [6]
Clearly, the long wave of Islamism, already penciled by Arnold Taoynbee in 1948 not as an universal religion but as a pervasive ideology, able to take the place of Nationalism and Socialism, has resulted, in the specific case of Turkey, as a general initiative ability, that has marginalized, among the others, the left parties and the worker trades.
In other contests – such as Egypt, Tunisia, Syria – this dynamics has been carried forward by the Muslim Brotherhood, in Turkey, in the last years, by the Refah Partisi and nowadays by AKP of Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
It cannot be denied that, in the country, there has been, in the last decade, such an economic development that he has succeeded to go out from the deficit situation of 2000, with an inflation at 69%, a negative mark GNP growth (-9%) and a public debt equal to the 78% of GNP, and it is also true that AKP has been able to build, trough ad-hoc economic policies, social and politic conditions allowing Turkey to open itself to the global market or, more precisely, to adapt itself to the new technologies and, at the same time, to the new needs of imperialistic supremacy.
These factors have made possible a huge process of outsourcing of those productions with an high content of living labor in areas where labor-force price is by far lower than in the more advanced industrialized fortresses, so determining a new international division of labor.
Therefore, the economic boom has been made possible, on the international plan, by coming to the guide-lines of central IMF, based mostly on the cornerstones of privatizations, liberalizations and on the reform of work market with the relative addition of the wage restraint, allowing in this way the afflux of foreign capitals, attracted from the more than advantageous conditions offered by Istanbul, in the form of the bureaucratic restriction loosening, reduction to 20% of the business incomes rates, the possibility to take profits in the country of origin, all included in a framework law through which “there is the creation of SEZ (special economic zones) in which the State gives economic incentives, free lands, fiscal attenuation, security contribution alleviation for workers, and there is also the opportunity to use public university structures to do researches and development in the interest of private firms.” And more over, “In labor matter, the first thing made by Erdogan’s government is to establish the practice of temporary work: in other words, in Turkish factories gang master system and other forms of ‘working for hire’ have been affirmed. And that is not all: measures of maximum flexibility of labor-force are introduced, and in few years Turkey arrives to have the highest medium working week in Europe – 53 hours! -, the lowest rate of working sick leaves, an awesome number of workplace fatalities, a rough minimum wage, in 2013, of 409 dollars – little more of 300 euro at month.” [7]
It is in such a context, characterized also by almost the 80% of population leaving countryside to go to live in the towns, that, also thanks to a skillful policy of subsidized credits, a new petty bourgeoisie, composed by people coming from Anatolia little rural centers, is born. These same people, who moved not only to Istanbul but also to Ankara, Izmir, Konya, Kayseri and Samsun, have become shop keepers and small businessmen; some hundreds among them, very close to AKP and called “Anatoli tigers”,
form the heart of the Islamic bourgeoisie, perfect synthesis between neo-liberalism and Islamism.
These businessmen, who run small and medium firms in Anatolia, drawing on the North-Eastern Italian productive realities, are the driving force of the Turkish economic boom of the last ten years and, forced both by the European Council deny, in 1998, about the Turkish candidacy for EU and by the stagnation of adhesion negotiations, starting in 2005, had to turn their attention, concerning commercial outlets, towards Central Asia, Middle East, Africa.
The competitiveness of Turkish lira – revalued, for the entire period in which the global economy was positive, by the big money inflow towards Turkey – has made possible that Turkish investments were preferred to those coming from Eurozone, replacing them in sectors such as pharmaceutic products, textile industry, consumer goods and real estate.
But the competitiveness, in the international challenge, can assert itself also through big conglomerations – Koc, Anadolu, Yildiz, Kale, Sabanci – in the hands of big urban bourgeoisie, laic and Kemalist, and therefore in contraposition with the Islamic and Anatoli ones.
These conglomerations are “powerful industrial groups, pronged but also flexible, ready to find new development opportunities. It is sufficient to think to the automotive sector: Koc has a joint-venture with Fiat group and, since a little time, in Erenler, Sakarya district, has started the realization of the second factory of “Turk Traktor, the joint-venture among Cnh, Fiat Industrial and Koc Holding, leader in the production of tractors. When it was necessary to focus the activity on finance, they developed banks and financial services. Then they launched themselves on energy, and, in the end, they smelt the telecommunication boom…Now big groups suffered an income decrease, in 2012, because of Eurozone crisis and they tried to get rid –even on the wave of dynamic ‘Anatoli tigers’ advance –of the nonstrategic activities, but they remain a standpoint for the big foreign groups arriving on Bosphorus, with which they conclude strong and successful agreements.” [8]
It is evident like the interests of those ones who were the “old steam bosses” clash with the politics pursued by Erdogan’s government because “in this last decade they have progressively lost rates of power. The role of this bourgeois part is not to be disregarded at all: not only because it enjoys positions established in the last century, not only because it has strong international connections, but also because it continues to be internal to the Turkish army and to represent, through the political instrument of CHP (Republican Popular Party), the greatest opposition in the country. Besides, it also enjoys a large popular supporting, legitimated by the reference to secularization values and to the figure of Ataturk.” [9]
So, it does not arouse astonishment that many CHP supporters were present at the protest revolts in Taksim Square against AKP government together with students, small businessmen, football ultras groups, anarchists, communists, Kurdish parties, unemployed.
Yes. Unemployed!
Because in this orgy of rhetoric reserved by press to one of the many “economic miracles”, to be attributed, naturally, to the thaumartugical virtues of “market”, this is a nonchalant passage to opposite “miracles”: with an inflation at 9% and the consequential rise of the cost of living, wages, in real terms, have lost their purchasing power. Not only. This frantic run to the growth imposes longer working times and always more intense paces of work, and, with this, an unemployment rate attested at 8,8%, regarding for a large portion young people aged between 16 and 29.
As we can see, an economic boom characterized by strong contradictions, that can be summed in the fact that considerable levels of populations have been marginalized compared to the development, not saying that their living conditions have even worsened.
And so, we can explain the heterogeneity of the protest social composition, that puts together different segments of society with historical opposed interests in an “embrassons nous”, further disorienting Turkish proletariat and, precisely, the working class.
If the AKP government has been able to guarantee remarkable profits to the American or to the European capital, so representing in the best way the interests of several imperialisms, at the same time it is trying to convert Turkish economic/financial power into influence, that is converting Turkey into a country not only dominant in a regional context – and for this reason it strongly interferes in the Syrian civil war – but also into a reference point for many Arabian countries and even for important internal components of the “Arabian springs”, seeing in Turkey the country where the “Islamic democracy” was completely realized.
But this pseudo-democracy, this AKP model, sublimated – in Gezi Park – by the triad “commercial center, barracks, mosque”, represents “…a perfect synthesis of Neo-Ottomanism in the AKP version, based on an omnivorous economic growth and the planning gigantism, on the rediscovered political and military role of the country, on the religious marker.” [10]
A Neo-Ottomanism fluctuating among ambitions to become a regional power, in the middle-east context, whereby its reference points are always Lahore, Beirut, Medina, Baku, the same Sarajevo and not Berlin, Paris or London, all the more that, inside EU, a certain skepticism towards Ankara resists, skepticism feeding inside Turkish society the so-called “Sevres syndrome” – from the name of the French small town where, in 1920, it was signed the treaty saying that, after the Ottoman empire fall, Turkey would have deprived itself of all the east territories and of the straits control.
But in retaliation it happens that, in a middle-east overview always more upset by crises, contrapositions and wars, the Turkish model begins to see its fascination power on the Arabian world obfuscated, because of its excessive nearness to Muslim Brotherhood and it also sees its Neo-Ottoman revanchism always more involved in Syrian war.
PERMANENT WAR. EVEN BETTER IF A PROXY ONE
Paradoxically, it happens that, while Ankara relies on its standing in Middle East and in Central Asia in order to offer a model of political “Islamism”, the same political Islamism – in the Egyptian version – is suffering a short circuit that, from Nile banks, where the president Morsi, expression of the Muslim Brotherhood, has been deprived of his authority by the army, risks to spread in the entire region and to produce, among several effects, just Ankara isolation, because of the analogy between what is happening in Cairo and what Turkey has already experienced in three occasions, from 1960 to 1980: the army intervention against the rising Islamic movements in order to protect the State secularity.
In a nutshell, the Egyptian coup d’état makes fail one of the keystones, with Qatar, on which, after “Arabian springs”, the Middle East new order based, order theorized precisely by Erdogan and that considered Ankara hegemonic role.
But the coup against Morsi will not be without consequences on the same Syria, where there is a very operative Muslim Brotherhood fighting against Assad inside a coalition called Syrian National Council, that, from the headway of a popular protest related to the Egyptian and Tunisian “springs”, has changed into a civil war, recalling, substantially, the Libyan facts, because external agendas have been overlapped to the popular insurgence, in the form of both economic and geo-strategic interests of the big and also regional supremacies, with the consequent internationalization of the war.
The Syrian popular rising has been explained, in its essential lines, with the same causes interesting the other Arabian countries: a catastrophic economic situation combined with an endemic unemployment, above all regarding young people: only 8,000 Syrians, on 300,000 approaching job market, succeed in having a regular employment contract. To these reasons, we must add the effects of neo-liberalist nastiness, passed off as reforms, imposed by international organisms that have transformed public monopolies into private ones, with all their bad consequences.
Faithful to these organism guidelines but, at the same time, defender of an only supposed anti-Imperialism, Syrian president Assad, however, has found the way, over the years, to give praiseworthy favors substantiating in the absolute stability of the Syrian-Israeli border or in the participation in the subcontract program of the “extraordinary renditions” and finally in the legitimateness the Saudi Arabian repression of Bahrein “spring”.
This has not manifestly been helpful to maintain Syrian “spring” in an essentially internal limit and to avoid it being, instead, completely assimilated by the regional and international supremacy game in a war that can be easily defined “proxy war”.
But, why the war?
And more: why this war?
On the magazine “Prometeo”, in December 2005, we highlighted how: “The most characteristic phenomenon in this decline phase of the bourgeois society is its intimate necessity to use war in order to exit from its economic crises, all of them having their origins in the contradictions of the capitalistic way of production. Every war is an imperialistic war of capital and, just for this reason, a fight against proletariat”, and then “So, the two imperialistic (world) wars have marked the end and the beginning of accumulation cycles; in the modus operandi of the declining Capitalism, wars have been dramatic brackets necessary to overcome crises and restart accumulation cycle.
The advance of Capitalism decline has determined that wars are not only a bracket in capital life, but a permanent way of life of the bourgeois society. In the last decades the imperialistic war has been a constant in capital reality.
The decline advance has in this way caused these wars as a way of being of Capitalism.”
And more, “A permanent war functional to the interests of the big economic and financial oligarchies in power and imposing to the entire international proletariat a very expensive price both in terms of human lives and a backflip in their life conditions.”
To conclude we highlight that “While the two previous imperialistic conflicts allowed Capitalism to start a new accumulation cycle, determining a phase of growth of the entire world economy, the wars fought in these last decades have had as an only consequence the exclusive enrichment of some fringes of the international bourgeoisie and the destruction of complete countries.
We are witnessing permanent wars that, compared to the past ones, do not create the premises for a new phase of economic development, through the rebuilding of the destroyed productive systems, but having as an only effect the death of millions of proletarians and the generalized destruction.” [11]
Why is there a war in Syria? Which actors are facing?
On the Syrian civil war background, we can find some questions pertinent to the strength relation redefinition among the three big powers, Russia, USA and China with the first one, to which geo-political considerations do not permit to leave the region and that is using the Syrian stimulus to regain a superpower dimension while USA, weighed down by a debt owned mostly by China and Japan as well as by a high public deficit, can no more support long and expensive conflicts, the more so as just the Chinese expansion in the Asia-Pacific area force them to reorient towards that area.
This explains why it is priority, for Washington, to preserve, in the middle Orient context, Israel hegemony, the more so as in a competition with Iran, that sees in Syria its merge into Mediterranean Sea along an axe going from Mediterranean to Persis Gulf. To make stable Damascus regime becomes, in this way, priority if they want to shape again the goals in the region of Gulf monarchies and the Turkish Neo-Ottomanism.
In the analysis of the dynamics characterizing the Syrian current scenery, an efficacious role is played by the match Arabian/Persian and Sunni/Shiite. Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other Gulf oil-monarchies have intervened in the pacific Syrian revolt to change it into a war against Assad filo-Iranian regime. The stakes is hegemony in the middle-oriental Islamic field, disputed by Saudi Arabia and Iran, with Qatar that, thanks to the enormous energetic and financial assets, slips away from Riyadh to play alone and propose itself as ally/treasurer in the “Arabian springs”, that is to take them far away from Gulf hydrocarbons.” [12]
Considering all these reasons, the more than obvious landing place, the easiest one over all the other considerations, can only be the match of the middle-East energetic pipes, with all that follows in terms of strategies, made up of contrapositions, alliances, conflict primer.
In the book “Euroil” there is a reference to “A new endless hydrocarbon field, discovered some years ago, called South Pars, on which most of the oil companies have liberally thrown.
More or less all of them, except the American ones, that, because of the commercial embargo towards Iran, cannot operate in that area.” [13]
It is not simply a super-field, strong of its extension on a 1,300 square kilometers extension, but is the mainstay of the Iranian energetic strategy in the next decades, actualizing through a treble pact Iran-Iraq-Syria, that considers the realization of a pipeline of 10 billion of dollars within 2016 and has as main aim the European market. So, the Iranian gas and the Iraqi one could reach the Syrian coast pole of Tartus, in this way cutting out completely Turkey.
It follows that this project of “Shiite pipeline” makes fibrillating not only Turkey and the “patrons” staying behind it, but also the other local actors, because, at the same time, Iran, together with Russia, is an active part in a prospecting project of the ‘Lebanese off-shore’ through technical assistance pacts.
Moscow, in fact, realizes all the counter-measures in order that Middle-east gas does not reach the trans-Anatolian pipeline Southern Corridor, sponsored, since 2007, by the USA government and providing for pacts between Turkish and Iraqi, in which Syria would become an important element of the project, because in a direct concurrence with the Russian pipeline South Stream for the provision of European South-East. In a very pertinent way, Margherita Paolini points out that: “ In the race fired up among producing countries, transit countries and countries with aspirations of exclusive “hub”, even more complicated by “majors” interests, Syria appears above all as a key player in Tehran geo-energetic project: to get to the Mediterranean Sea through the strategic itinerary Iraq-Syria, that reveals itself possible as never before in virtue of the strict alliance relations with Baghdad government.” [14]
The energetic self-sufficiency achieved by USA with the “shale gas” has deducted Qatar of a prominent slice of the market, that now needs to compensate this decline by looking for, it too, new landing places on the Mediterranean coast and from there to the European market, and for this reason it cultivates a local collaboration project with Turkey, that is in a situation of impasse, because it is excluded by the programs inherent future productions and exportations, for which reason it has all the interest, together with Qatar, to deprive Assad of his authority and to stop the Shiite pipeline, substituting it with another project that, deprived of the Iranian presence, would see Iraqi and Qatar gas, after having transited through Syria, direct towards Anatolia and from here to the European market.
It is of use to bear in mind, in order to realize the criticality/absurdity of the situation, that all these energetic projects are still in a feasibility stadium, but just only this is sufficient to cause a civil war with daily massacres, saying a lot about what the capitalistic “civilization” correlated to what its mythic Neo-Liberalism daily passes off us.
International crisis and cold war
The confusion is big under the (capitalistic) sky…and the situation is not so excellent. From G8 in Lough Eme, whose aim was to promote a new cooperation program for the North of the world and that was focused on the big crisis and employment themes, we have had always the same result: inconclusiveness.
The way of these meetings, both G8 and G20, is paved with virtual agreements and factual disputes, and all because the incidence of a crisis, finding its origins in the contradictions of the accumulation process, cannot be eluded, due to the current and persistent relations of capitalistic production. A crisis in which: “Capitals always bigger are not able to be adequately remunerated and this springs out from the conduct of the law about the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. The economy financialization has been an answer by Imperialism to the always many requests of adequately remunerating capitals invested in the production world…For a certain number of years, thanks to the production increases and to the drastic decrease of the cost of labor-power, the produced fictitious capital has found sufficient plus-value with which remunerating itself.
Today the dimensions assumed by several forms of fictitious capital production are so huge that the global produced plus-value is not anymore sufficient to remunerate adequately such a large quantity. From here the start of the financial crisis and the fictitious capital destruction, with ill-fated repercussions on the entire global economy.” [15]
What we said is useful to unveil the insurmountable difficulties found by these international meetings when they have to give an answer different from the several words “growth, employment”, remained simple intent declarations, however aggravated by the progress in no particular order of the several actors and by an always more exasperated competiveness among them. Just in this climax, we find the negotiation of free commerce between Europe and USA (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership – TTIP), with the explicit goal to limit intrusion of the so called BRICS countries, that, according to optimistic previsions, would entail benefits for the entire EU: 1 million and 400,000 work places, retribution increase and an average growth of 5%.
Also the possibilities for some European firms to do investments and businesses would increase and it happens that German firms would have the more benefits by it, particularly tool factories, informatics technology sector and, of course, banks. Anyway, a foundation such as “Hans Boeckler, near to German trades, calls this treaty into question since it would not produce any growth, due to the fact that custom duties between European Union and USA nowadays are already so low that the effects of an additional decrease would be just barely noticed, while some negative consequences would interest worker rights and rules defending environment. Definitely this treaty is seen as a shot in the arm for economies such as the German and the American ones, whose elements, beyond the emphasis of certain journalists/pipers, do not inspire an uncontrolled enthusiasm.
The same Federico Rampini notices it: “With regards to real economy, changes are not so rushed. Work market is better but there is nothing sudden or spectacular. For the moment, the unemployment rate remains stable at 7,6%. Even more, if we include the discouraged workers (who are not looking for a work) and the ones forced to be content with a part-time job, unemployment reaches 14,3% of the labor-power.” [16]
Almost twice the amount! In the same “model for Europe” – Germany – economy shows already some sufferance if, beyond the factories in crisis, we focus on the precarious and low-paid occupation. More than part-time job, there is 20% people working with the so called “mini-jobs” with wages of 450 a month. According to the elements always given by the foundation Hans Boeclkler, this is added with the fact that to an 11 Euros hourly wage in West Germany, it corresponds an 8,30 Euros one in East Germany, which highlights as “in the last two decades Germany has reached an extremely problematic inequality degree on the social and economic level.” A braking GNP –index of a possible slowing down of an economy from which many countries depend – is instead the disquieting element coming from China, where it just seems that the Golden Age is ending.
In fact, data indicate that in the first trimester of 2013, GNP has decreased to the 7,7%, in respect to the 7,9% of the last trimester of 2012, while in 2013 it would further re-dimension itself to the 7,4%, and all this has to do with both the European stagnation and the slow American recovery, that, in its turn, asks for a lowering of austerity politics in Europe, shall be a lowering of the same USA economy. Therefore, we navigate to view, and the approaches to solve the crisis show themselves as different, if not contrasting.
While Japan and USA prefer the option of expansive fiscal and currency politics, with the consequential fear by emerging countries that the lots of liquidity created on global markets would discharge on their economies, with the annexed inflation and possible speculative bubbles, Europe conforms–or, at least, it seems so – to politics characterized by austerity. Such a complicated and critical situation lets see in transparency an always more shaped and substantial reality: a new cold war.
The Vulgate on the rise speaks about warning signs of cold war, passing on the fact that, even if there has not been, after the fatidic “end of history” foretold by Francis Fukuyama, fought wars, in direct contraposition, among big powers, this does not mean that, in Imperialism era, the so called “cold war” has not been a constant, before and after 1989.
And we can understand how much the situation is not at all reassuring from the Chinese-Japanese dispute about the little isles Diaoyu/Senkaku, the equivalent of some insignificant cliffs, probably loathed even by sea birds.
Well, this dispute can, without strain, serve as a paradigm of the international tensions that, when they do not remain in the latent state of “cold war”, burst in explosions assuming mainly the traits of a “civil war” (see Libya, Syria, Mali, while the same China could take the place of Egypt).
The case of the little isles in the East Chinese Sea is not, of course, more resounding or unprecedented than what happened in 1983 with the invasion of the Caribbean isle of Grenada by USA Marines. Then and now, it has been a matter of claiming the geo-strategic importance of an area and of reaffirming its own control rights on it.
A devastating crisis such as the current one, marked by the jam of the capital promotion mechanisms, exacerbates the competition on a worldwide scale and this aggressiveness, this resoluteness are directly proportional to the intensity of this crisis.
A competition interesting both the commercial market and the financial one, the energetic resources control or the raw materials management, the space militarization and also the starting of the so called “informatics wars”.
At the base, there is a bustle having to do with the current world order, successive to the ex-Ussr implosion, and that could result in a few decades in the disappearance of some variables until now characterizing the nowadays situation.
We have accounted the economic obligations strongly influencing the USA actions, nevertheless, as Henry Kissinger has asserted: “We live in an era in which America cannot neither dominate the world either pull itself back, while it delivers itself simultaneously all-powerful and totally exposed.”
This explains why, for example, Americans are setting up plans to stay in Afghanistan for at least another decade, or how they intend to manage their recent preeminence – thanks to the so called “fracking” technology – in the natural gas production.
The inconsistency of the situation as a whole can be emblematized by the relations between China and Japan, characterized by what was defined the “torsion era”, that is the lack of correspondence between the geo-political and security relations as well as the economic ones. To explain it more clearly: “In 2007 China became the first commercial partner of Japan, removing USA. The increase of the commercial dependence rate from China has been analogous to the decrease of the dependence from USA: in 1999 it was equal to 9,1%, in 2009 it had reached the 20,5%. This growing economic inter-dependence contrasts with the generally conflicting nature of the Chinese-Japanese relation on the geo-political plan: in the same years in which China became the first commercial partner of Japan, the relations between the two actors got more and more strained.” [17]
On the other hand, this latent conflict is not limited only to the relation China-Japan because it includes other historical enemies of Chinese, that is Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, and the convincing reason lies in the fact that: “Through the Chinese competed atolls in the Pacific, every year 5 trillion of dollars in goods transit, the half of the global tonnage. Who controls the way, owns the producers and clients economy. Then, the ocean floors, thanks to technology, are the new safe for Earth energy: gas, oil, minerals and rare soils for high-tech. To dominate Pacific is equal to guarantee oneself the most economic raw materials in the next decades.” [18]
Here we can find the origins of USA primary necessity to contain China with a kind of sanitary belt, repressing its expansive wishes and clashing against the assault to the world first place, considered by China as something essential, where, according to the colonel Mingfu: “If in the XXI century China cannot become the Number One in the world, the most important power, then it will unavoidably be put aside, be cornered.”
It is to prevent this eventuality that “Celestial Empire” heirs, in a by now multipolar system, intensify the economic/financial relations both in Africa and in Europe, mainly with Germany, that, alone, represents the 48% of the interchange Chine-European Union, in a context where the German power is farther and farther than the American one, in order to privilege alliances, partnerships with Russia in addition to China.
It is of use to remember, in this regard, that if Germany can be proud of clearly superior economic performances than the other European countries, well, it is largely due to the preferential relations with China, a China that has allowed Berlin to diversify its economy – minimizing the risks – so that it does not totally depend from an European market by time in recession.
Conclusions
It is just starting from this very critical fact that there is the necessity to do some final observations, concerning the big absent in the current dynamics: the proletariat.
In an international situation marked by crisis, that has burnt 200 millions of job places, in a frame where the general worsening of life and working conditions for the international proletariat against which, very briefly, all the contradictions of capitalistic system are dumped, in a social context dominated by the dictatorship of Western, Eastern, Hebraic and Muslim bourgeoisie, in which we talk too much about the clash of civilizations “invented, fed and instigated against the class struggle”, as properly Marco Bascetta on “Manifest” highlights and as, likewise properly, observes later: “It would be time that this last (the class struggle, editor’s note) took its revenge.” [19], well, it pleases us to hear a lone voice, using finally a word not at all obsolete, just like labor power, class Party, revolutionary passing of the current relations of production: class struggle.
But the phrase remains a little incomplete, unclear, if we do not introduce again clearness and resoluteness, the last goal of class struggle: Communism.
Notes
1] R. Monteleone – Il Manifesto - May, 28th 2006
2] G. Colotti – Il Manifesto – June, 21th 2013
3] B. de Sousa Santos – Il Manifesto – June, 22th 2013
4] A. Penati – La Repubblica – June, 22th 2013
5] B. Petrini – Il Manifesto – June, 6th 2013
6] R. Guolo – La Repubblica – June, 2nd 2013
7] Clash City Workers –June, 18th 2013
8] V. Da Rold – Il Sole 24 Ore – May, 17th 2013
9] Clash City Workers – June, 18th 2013
10] R. Guolo – La Repubblica – June, 2nd 2013
11] Prometeo n. 12 – December 2005
12] Limes n. 2, Editorial – March 2013
13] P. Conti, E. Fazi, “Euroil” – Fazi Editore
14] M. Paolini, “Mezzaluna calante” – Limes n.2 – March 2013
15] L. Procopio – D-M-D’ n. 4 – December 2011
16] F. Rampini – La Repubblica –July, 6th 2013
17] N. Lanna – Limes n. 6 – November 2012
18] G. Visetti – La Repubblica – August, 29th 2012
19] M. Bascetta – Il Manifesto – July, 9th 2013