In the Modern Imperialism

NATIONAL QUESTION

AND PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION

IN THE MODERN IMPERIALISM

Robert Bibeau

By the same author

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The narcissism, neurosis of a period.

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Publishing House: L’Harmattan

SUMMARY

PREFACE

CHAPTER 1National question and proletarian revolution

CHAPTER 2 Ferguson, Minneapolis, Dallas, same proletariat, samefight

CHAPTER 3 The Marxists and the national question

CHAPTER 4 Nationalism andSocialism

CHAPTER 5 Marxism, Nationalism and national struggles today

CHAPTER 6 Leninism orMarxism?

The imperialism andthe national question

NOTES

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE

ROBERT BIBEAU

Contrary to the claims of "separatists" and in spite of the media hype surrounding some nationalist events (Brexit, Catalan and Scottish referendums, Flemish and Quebec separatism) the national question is less and less present in the mind of international proletariat. To tell the truth, there is only the right and the bourgeois left to ignite about the chauvinistic nationalist trifles. The deepening of the systematic economic crisis of imperialism causes big political, military and social disorders, the resurgence of nationalist, gregarious vague desires in the petty bourgeois is among them, it will pass.

It is necessary to go back to Lenin, the Bolsheviks and to the Russian Revolution to redraw the origin of the confusiongenerated between the bourgeoisstruggles of national liberation(calledof nationalindependence) and the internationalist anti-capitalist struggles of the proletarian class. Afterward, Stalin carried the banner ofRussian National-Bolshevism higherthan that of the German National-Socialism and the USSR crushed the German power of Krupp and Messerschmitt, before collapsing in his turn. After the national-Bolshevism, the national-Maoism mounted the Trojan horse of the bourgeois nationalism and made struggling between the"Three worlds"; the "national-imperialist" world of both superpowers; the "national-capitalist" world of the secondary powers and the "national-Third-World" world of the non-aligned countries - preys of the first two worlds and that the Maoist China would have liked enfeoffing-. Deng Xiaoping,the Chinese Stalin, begun, beganthe economic capitalist "take off" in China and assuredto this emerging power the industrial and financialmeansof his globalized ambitions. The misfortune of Chinese capital is that its rise occurs when the globalized capitalist mode of production, at its declining imperialist stage - completes its conquest of the planet. The globalized imperialism, having reached its peak can only decline. That is to say,the capital in China, India and Africa complete the proletarianization of the last semi-feudal farmers, the conquest of the last markets, and the exploration of the last regions of peripheral resources. A century after the prediction of Lenin, the world popular uprising is on the agenda and the Chinese proletariat (and not the Chinese farming community as thought byMao) could give the international insurrectionary start. This evolution determines that the national question willhave less importance in the world policy because both classes which struggle for the hegemony are both social classes arisen from the industrial, urbanand global capitalist development - the decadent multinational capitalist classand the emerging international proletarian class. From this titanic war will be born surely the communist proletarian mode of production that we do not know and that the proletariat will have to learn to control, if at least "the avant-garde"of the bourgeois left can keep silent and let make the revolutionary working class.

In this booklet we gathered some texts dealing with the national question. Some of these authors adopt a "Marxist" posture and condemn any position which, in their opinion, does not correspond to the "Marxist" standard. This sectarian and dogmatic behavior is the inheritance of the Second, Third and FourthInternational and the integration of these organizations to the bourgeois State apparatus. The "bolshevization" of left organizations was marked by the exclusion of the "dissidents" and the glorification of the gurus by their express couriers, recruited under the militarized "democratic centralism", in order to"protect" the "ideological purity" and the sectarian loyalty towards these ephemeral galleys. Who has not ever heard about the "Little father of the people" and about the "Great Helmsman"?

This exclusion, which struck at first the opposition of German, Dutch, Polish, Italian and French left, has afterward infiltrated the sects stemming from this opposition. Today, every left-wing sect practises the exclusion, the division and the refusal to discuss, isolating fiercely his activists of any proletarian influence. Evaluating the level of concordance of a class political line with a statutory reference, whether he is Marx or Engels, Bukharin or Lenin,Trotskyor Stalin, Mao or Gramsci, is a dogmatic ideological, dialectical anti-materialist practice, which does not allow to validate an analysis of class,and which succeeds hardly in measuring the conformity of a thought with that of a made sacred and motionless dogma. For our part, we don’t adhere to any sect, toany dogma, totally enfeoffed that we stand with the proletarian class, with its revolutionary interests and with the historic and dialectical materialistic method.

Robert Bibeau. Director of the web magazine

http: //

CHAPTER 1

National question and proletarian revolution(1)

Robert Bibeau

Nation and nation-state two banners of the bourgeois left

Nation and nation-state are singular forms of the relations of production generated by the capitalist mode of production (MPC).When this production had peaked and the fundamental contradiction, governing this system, had begun to impedethe valuation of capital;when the national relations of production appeared too narrow to allow the expanded reproduction of capital and the development of socialproductive forces, nation and nation-state became obstacles of which the MPC sought to divest, hoping thus to generate a new era of globalized prosperity.In 1971, the abrogation of Bretton Woodsagreements puts an end to monetary barriers in front of the extreme urgency to liberalize and globalize the international trade(2). The efforts to transform the US national dollar in currency of international trade, as well as the embezzlements to bring to the foreground the euro as alternative currency of the world trade, or still, the shenanigans to substitute the Chinese national yuan or the Special Drawing Rights (DTS), show the difficulties of globalized financial system(3).

Neither the preservation, nor the conversion of the national relations of production will be able to ensure the sustainability of this dying mode of production.The fundamental contradiction that governs this system is not located between the international productive forces and the national relations of production, but within the same social productive forces, between the dead - constant - automated and digitized capital - already valued, absorbing the living – variable capital - the social workforce, generator of surplus value still not valued by the marketing of products, this is all the drama of this mode of production and the limit of its expansion. The international proletarian class must not tag along the national bourgeoisies to try to preserve the “national” relations of production, subjected to the vicissitudes of the systemic crisis of globalized capitalism.The outdated, bourgeois national structures are inoperative in front of the systemic crisis of the capitalist mode of production.All national and/or multinational structures of capitalism, UN, ICC, IMF, WB, OECD, NATO, EU, Shanghai CooperationOrganization, Commonwealth of Independent States, are obsolete and will have to be destroyed by the popular uprising.Under no circumstancesthe bourgeois national State can become an agent of emancipation of the proletarian class.Instead, the bourgeois national State and the bourgeois nationalist ideology, that would want to legitimize it, are the organizers of the oppression of the working class, unique revolutionary classunder the decadent capitalism.Since the emergence of modern imperialism, last phase of the capitalist mode of production, the struggles of so-called “anti-imperialist national liberation” are reactionary wars led by nationalist, chauvinistic bourgeoisies to ensure their status of prison guard of the interests of an imperialist alliance against another one.

Apogee and decline of the American imperialism.
The United States of America, first imperialist power in the twentieth century, were inexorably pushed against France (which they acquired Louisiana in 1803), against Canada (war of 1812), against the rests of the Spanish Empire (1819), against Mexico (1845-1853), then two factions of the American capital turned the one against the other one, the slave Confederacy of the South, against the capitalist Union of the North (1861-1865). More than 620 000 workers-soldiers left the life in this national war, then, the redone unity, the bloodthirsty step westward resumed. Later, they will attack the British commercial and industrial Empire and the Second French Empire which they disintegrated in order to impose the modern - financial –imperialism instead of the old colonial-commercialimperialism, which could not survive because it provoked the ire and the constant uprisings of the colonial national bourgeoisies, wishing to free itself politically from oppressive metropolises, to settle as national intermediaries of the exploitation of the local labor force, delivering themselves the capital gain to the globalized imperialism. All the wars of the so-called "national liberation" will concern this crucial point: what part of the exploitation oflocal paid employment will be monopolized by the national bourgeoisie and what part will be paid to the foreign capitalists? It is what the American president Theodore Roosevelt understood before Lenin and the Bolsheviks,chauvinistic nationalist feeling that the US exploited to dislodge the competing commercial colonial ex-powers and substitute the financial imperialism on which Lenin wrote splendidly by specifying that even set against the colonial-commercial capitalism the financial imperialism exploits not less the proletarian class, unique producer of capital gainand sworn enemy of the globalized capitalism.
When it seemed obvious that the Bolsheviks did not intend to share the fruits of the exploitationof the Soviet national proletariat with the Western imperialism, the conflict degenerated at war total between the empire of the soviets and the Western empire, managed at first by Europe and then by America. The war to be finished entered then in a phase which, after many misadventures, ends in 1991 with the dreadful person Boris Eltsin, annoys mortuary thurifier of the Union of the Soviet socialist republics.
During a century the United States were the allies of these Third-World nationalist bourgeoisies (pseudo non-aligned) wishing to share with the Western war traders a part of the capital gain produced locally. And you saw Mandela strutting about on the stages of the antiapartheid of the UN (that the South Africans undergo even today), Ho Chi Minh, Chou en lai,Pol Pot, Ceausescu, Tito, Nasser, Gandhi, and the others, all happy to collaborate with the American capital, to obtain their national sustenance, more plentiful than what proposed them Stalin, Khrouchtchev and Brezhnev, leader of an prefinancial, outmoded industrial empire. Today, we see Castro - the brother of theother one - who travels his way of Canossa to obtain a safe-conduct of the United States for his integration to the mode of capitalist production.

We can’t lead an anti-imperialist war if it is notalso an anti-capitalist, anti-nationalist and anti- bourgeois war. Any and all these struggles of so-called national political liberation have led to the consolidation of nationalist, capitalist factions and to the alienation of the national proletarian class.Whether it is USSR, China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Algeria, Cuba, Angola, Nicaragua, Ethiopia, Eastern countries, Albania, South Africa, Nepalor Palestineetc.many nationalist experiences that without the elimination of the capitalist mode of production, source of all the alienations, have turned into a nightmare for the over-exploited proletarian class of these gangrenous countries and which must now release fromhis new jailers.

Reforms or revolution?

It is true, however that in vein attempts to save their capital and their dying mode of production the internationalist capitalist class tries to dismantle the old relations of production and the old structures of national governance for transforming them into something multinational, but having the same economic, political, legal, diplomatic and military exploitative and repressive functions.These transformations of the apparatus of imperialist governance don’t aim at transforming the essence of the capitalist mode of production, but to adapt it to the new requirements of the modern imperialist political economy.The efforts of leftists and populiststo direct these reforms, does not constitute a contribution to the reversal of capitalism, no more than the Ludditeartisanswho would break the spinning machines in the England of 19thcentury did not contribute to emancipate the British proletariat.

Thus, Brexitis not a resistance to US imperialism, but a joining the Chinese imperialism, and a demand for renegotiation of the agreements with the European imperialism which will bring nothing to the British proletariat. These futile efforts on behalf of the reformist oligarchy prolong only the agony of this dying mode of production, just like the songs of the nationalist left and the complaints of sycophants of the reactionary right to preserve these old national shells.

The mode of production must be replaced.The only solution is to create a new mode of production, not socialist, but proletarian communist.From this new mode of production will arise new relations of production adapted to this new way of producing, communicating, distributing, exchanging and sharing not goods, filled with despoiled capital gain, but social assets for the collective reproduction of the life in society, because you should never forget that the purpose of any mode of production is to assure the conditions of reproduction of human life.We know very little about this new proletarian mode of production –from the name of the class that will bring to light from its hands, from its experience and his knowledges -.The only things we know with certainty is that this mode of production will be international, global, in the service of Man – without social class - no mercantile (goodbye goods, capital gain, profit, currency, capital, private property, wage-earner and State).This new mode of production will not especially look like what we knew under the capitalism in its Western, Soviet, Chinese, Cuban, Korean, Vietnamese, Albanian or Third World versions.We also know that this new proletarian mode of production, which will not meet the purposes of widened reproduction of the capital as mode of struggle against the rarity, will succeed in filling all the human social needs, ultimate purpose of a socialized mode of production.

Marx wrote

Marx warned the international proletariat against the reactionary bourgeois nationalism and he registered in the Manifestothese two maxims: "The proletariat has no country” and “Workers of all countries unite!"To introduce the popular uprising, then the proletarian revolution, Marx did not appeal to the "oppressed people", to "exploited nations", to the "impoverished farmers" or to the "nuttypetty bourgeois".When Marx observed that the objective conditions of the proletarian revolution were not absolutely united in this beginning of triumphant capitalism, he called for dissolving theFirst Internationalpreventing from becoming adenof reformist bureaucrats – and parasitic petty bourgeois, hired by bourgeois power and fed by contributions of the despoiled working class.

Here is an extract of the correspondence of Marx concerning exactly these chauvinistic nationalist divisions plotted by the Victorian capital to divide the forces of international proletariat within the British Empire: “England has now a working class split into two enemy camps: English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his living condition. He feels about him member of an imperious nation, becoming, therefore, an instrument of his aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland and strengthens thus their power on himself. Religious, social and national prejudices are erected against the Irish worker. He behaves towards him more or less as the“white poor people” towards the blacks in the old slave States of the American Union. The Irishman gives tit for tatwidely. He sees in him at the same time the accomplice and the blind instrument of the English domination in Ireland. This antagonism is artificially maintained and instigated by the press, the sermons, the funny magazines, in brief by all means which the classes in power have. This antagonism constitutes the secret of the impotence of the English working class, in spite of its good organization. It is also the secret of the persistent power of the capitalist class, of which it is fully conscious”(4).