IMPERIALISM. NO FUTURE WITHOUT NEW SOCIALISM

After capitalism had won socialism with a few rounds in Eastern Europe, people widely fell in an ideological vacuum. The possibility of socialism to win the global capitalism lost its credibility and, in many people´s opinion, it was looosing it for good and all.

But the world is young. The anti-capitalism struggle is only beginning. This struggle is a prerequisite for humanity and nature. Working for a better world is meaningful in spite of the present apparent supermacy of the capitalist headquarters. Grounds for socialist vision and optimism exist.

No other genuine feasible alternative but Marxism has been presented to capitalism. The Marxist literature and debate are living a new upswing.

Capitalism has driven itself into state where it seems to have no changes to get out of. Problems cannot be solved by manipulating the figures of the world-wide mass unemloyment nor by parroting the speeches about the economic growth. The fluctuations of the capitalist economy have booms, but they are followed by increasingly deep depressions. The attainable limits of the real growth have been reached. Nature cannot sustain even the present volumes of production and consumption, to say nothing of their increase.

The world capitalism, as an ideology, is based on a destructive utopia of continuous economic growth. But in reality, the growth of production stops and turns down. This is what happens also to profits.

New, important markets will not be created, because the decreasing profits of large corporations will lead to reductions in production costs, especially by way of cheap labour and wage reductions. The avarage national income may rise at regional levels, but, owing to the growing income disparities, the real purchasing power will weaken in industrialized counries and will not generally grow in developing countries. Raw materials, too, are a limited quantity.

Privatisation and competitive bidding of the public sector services will not, in fact, lead to free competition but to its opposite, monopoly economy. Particularly in the circumstances of the European concentraded ownership, labour costs are pushed down in the name of supranational stabilisation. And once again the purchasing power weakens...

Turning society into private business units means, among other things, that in its production activities such society needs mainly young and highly educated people. For other people there hardly is any use. On the other hand, children, sick and old people hardly make any consumers, and so, once again, capitalism does harm for itself. Besides, such a system is not a human society. The EU integration means endeavours just toward that direction.

The trend of the capitalist world economy is permanently downhill, toward instability. Southeast Asia seems to be the center of the present instability. The economies of Japan, South Korea and many other Asian countries seem to have reached the end of their journey. The possible artificial temporary upgoings do not change the matter.

The experimentation by Russia with capitalism has come to a miserable end in spite of the billions of dollars allocated there. It might be a question of a turning point in the world history. There might occur temporary upgoings in the world capitalisn, but the basic direction is downwards.

In the capitalist headquarters they fear that the situation will get out of their control.

Fear leads to measures in the economic, political and military areas. The carrying out of the astronomically expensive military projects in manifest. Analyses need not to be very deep to prove that armament is horizontally directed, against citizens. One state could be regarded as a threat by another. This kind of justification for armament is not valid any more, at any rate not in industrialised countries. The aim of Nato-led military policy is ideological. It defends capitalism.

Capitalism aims at economic stabilisation at any price, for instance the prices of currency, shares and other securities and raw materials.

In both armament and stabilisation the paymen are of course those with the lowest means and income.

The political aim is to get rid of what is usually called democracy. Capitalism is marketed as democracy although the power in it is systematically concentrating in the hands of fewer and fewer people. Capitalism also constitutes and an obstacle to the formation of balanced markets. Its aim is monopoly economy. Capitalism and market economy are different things.

In capitalism, speaking about "democracy" is virtually allowed only by using parliamentary phrases. But the hollowness of the parliamentary-type of system is quite obvious from the point of view of fulfilling the people´s will.

The power of Parliaments has vanished in the wheels of the official machinery and in the malfunction of the legislative system as a whole. The jungle of laws is so complex that it will hardly be possible to make amendments to them. An amendment to one Act of Parliament would necessitate amendments to other Acts and degrees. Amending each one of these requires a similiar process. The practical problems of legislation have increased progressively, up to their impossibility.

The governmental power harnessed by big business takes advantage of this situation. Its political objectives are pushed through with ease and without care in "the system of representation of the people", because it has no technical possibilities and evidently no will to oppose the political aims of those who really exercise power.

In the bourgeois society, elections are supposed to be free. We can freely elect among the candidates who are offered to us. Not too much consideration is given to the quarters which nominate the candidates nor to the conditions for their nominations. But with the view to the final results of elections, that stage is decisive, not any more elections themselves. In parliamentary elections, candidates are gererally nominated within and between party offices.

In Major parties, a person who criticises the system has, in fact, no chance to become nominated.

Not until after the nomination of candidates is the actual election circus launched by the media which is controlled by big business.

The mandate mathematics of the parliamentary-type state is so obsolete that it is not practicable even in this respect. In the United States of America a whole group of senators resigned voluntarily. They had come to the conclusion that their work is useless. In the United States of America, important decisions are made elsewhere, not in Congress.

The bourgeois parliamentarism is defended as being "the only possible form of democracy". There are, however, alternatives. Realisation of a functional region-based democracy is nothing but a mathematical application and, as such, fully possible.

In this system, the upper level of representation has to be accountable for its doings to the lower level of representation. A real democracy can be realised only by giving priority to the power of the grass root representations. At the moment, for instance in Finland, the situation is exactly the opposite. The power triangle is standing on its apex.

Speaking about politics at the system level is prohibited in practice. Opposing the system is a punishable act. There are several punitive procedures. Unemployment and threatening with unemployment are effective means to keep people down also in the system issues.

Genuine political oppositions are factually prohibited. Ostensible oppositions, on the other hand, maintain illusions of democracy.

Security police and different official and unofficial organisations and intelligence agencies of big business take care of that extraparliamentary opposition groups could not be formed.

It is tragicomic that the United States of America, who have been making noises about democracy and human rights, have supported and continue to support in various parts of the world the military juntas, who are fully indifferent about democracy and human rights.

Supervisory and coercive measures are taken at different levels in different countries. In the states of high educational levels procedures are generally very prudent. One does not easily always notice them. Whereas in many Asian, African and Latin American countries, measures are taken without any scruples.

Efforts are made to make the European union into centrally planned federal state. It is and will be a totalitarian state. We already have heard of proposals for restricting the freedom of speech and the right to strike.

Europe and the whole world are sliding into the capitalist dictatorship. The fact that in some parts of the world shop shelves are groaning with goods and entertainment offering galore, does not change anything. Bread and circuses. On the other hand, masses of people in the world are lacking even these things.

The alternative is socialist democracy in which democracy is realised at higher level. Different transitional forms have been proposed but they all have collapsed for lack of a comprehensive theory. The Marxist way is not easy, either. The classicists of socialism forecasted that the first endeavour at socialism would founder. It is a question of so big a change both in social structures and in the minds of individual people that setbacks are quite natural. And correspondingly, bourgeois democracy suffered several defeats before the definitive victory over the feudal system.

In the history of philosophy of science, the dialectical materialism, which is the basis of socialism, still represenets the culmination of developement of the philosophy of science. Other scientific traditions are built either upon religion-oriented idealism or spiritless mechanical materialism.

Socialism, communism and virtually politics as a whole, including the related theory formation, suffered a serious setback along with the defeat of socialism in some rounds. The mere neoliberalist right-wing politics, even as a concept, in an impossibility. The Right cannot exist without the Left.

Sooner or later the time of capitalism is over. What will follow depends on ourselves. If we do nothing, consequences will certainly be disastrous. On the other hand, solutions can be found to everything if we set to work.

Socialism and communism, as concepts, have to be restored to their glory.

The basis of the traditional West European welfare states has been the strong labour movement, in which communists had an important role. At those times parliaments, too, worked. Results were achieved through action of the masses. The same masses are availabale also today. It is only a question of getting them started.

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December 1st, 2002

Al-Qaeda, "terrorism", NATO

The western media has created an idea of a well-organized terrorist organization by the name Al-Qaeda, which - according to the the mainstream mass media - represents all possible evil.

However, Al-Qaeda is only one of several fundamendalist-islamic groups. It does not have exact organizational form and its members do not have membership cards. There are plans to destroy Al-Qaeda. Yet Al-Qaeda appears as a typical cell-organized system, in which members usually do no even know each other. It is impossible to destroy that kind of a system.

The real connections between the already completed attacks and Al-Qaeda are not at all clear.

Emphasizing signifigance of Al-Qaeda by the U.S. president in the "war against terrorism" is quite apparently an intentional media trick.

In the real world there are hundreds of millions of angry people living in misery and ready to fight if possible. There are also a lot of different anti-imperialist groups and parties with many kind of ideologies, potentially ready for planned or spontaneous violences.

The real intention of the "war against terror" is to try to destroy all capitalism-critical opposition groups in the world. The corresponding propaganda labels all oppositions as "evil" in order to justify any kind of methods to be used against them.

There are several exmples. Among others the peaceful Turkish People´s Liberation Front (DHKC) has been declared as a "terrorist" organization by many EU-countries and its members have been imprisoned by the demand of the Turkish government in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and the U.K. A Philippine communist is in prison in the Netherlands on the same basis. Palestine people living in western Europe have been arrested on the basis of their nationality. And so forth...

Authorities of EU countries are responsible for unscrupulous violating of human rights in that type of activities.

World capitalism has given NATO the mission to do the dirty global work, to destroy "terrorism".

The idea to smash people´s level resistance by NATO´s armed machinery is nothing but a lie and a childish dream.

NATO´s real mission is to serve as a tool of imperialism, to conquer geopolitically important areas of the world, especially countries with oil resources.

World´s violence will calm down when imperialism and unscrupulous capitalism are replaced by at least some kind of justice. To be said in other words: If world´spolitical leaders do not want to realize this self-evident fact, the spiral of violence will expand for ever and no war machinery can stop it.

The worst terrorism is the "fight against terrorism".

KOMINFORM