Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon, Syria... The capitalist spiral of militarism and chaos!

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The toll of ongoing wars is terrible. In Ukraine, the number of dead and wounded already exceeds one million, with territories and towns completely razed to the ground, as in the town of Mariopol, which has been wiped off the map! In the Middle East, the headlong rush into Gaza has been leading to a veritable genocide. Here too, everything has been razed to the ground, and the devastated territories will lie fallow for decades to come. Then there are the related confrontations, with their deadly consequences, as in Lebanon, the Red Sea, Yemen and, more recently, Syria. And other more serious threats are accumulating and threatening to erupt, notably between China and Taiwan.

A real escalation of diplomatic and warlike tensions

Since last summer, we have witnessed a real escalation of military conflicts, with fighting and massacres intensifying everywhere. Since the start of the conflict in Ukraine and almost three years of extremely violent warfare, the Ukrainian army has finally made an incursion onto Russian soil, in the Kursk region. In eastern Ukraine, the Russian army still seems to be making progress, at the cost of very heavy losses. Children are being slaughtered shamelessly. With the support of North Korean soldiers, but also Sri Lankan, Houthi, etc., the conflict is taking on another, more perilous dimension, dragging in its wake more states or military groups, even if the reinforcements reflect the difficulties and shortages from which Russia is suffering.

In the Middle East, after two years of war, the conflict has also intensified, with more than 44,000 people already killed in Gaza, the majority of them civilians; 1,700 Israelis, along with a few foreign nationals and hostages, and the opening of a new front that has spread brutally to Lebanon, where the centre of Beirut quickly came under fire (more than 3,000 civilian deaths). To this macabre toll must be added a host of wounded and displaced people.

Even more recently, in Syria, Islamist groups, taking advantage of the powerlessness of Russia (allied to Bashar al-Assad) and Israel's regular bombing of the country, launched an offensive on the city of Aleppo. This new outbreak of violence, opportunely taking advantage of the disorder in the Middle East, not only represents a further expansion of the chaos but could in turn have even more deadly consequences.

These conflicts have therefore escalated even further, particularly since the American elections, when Biden was, embarrassingly, forced to support Netanyahu's unbridled extremism; he was also recently pressured to authorise Ukraine's use of longer-range missiles, capable of reaching targets within a 300-kilometre radius on Russian soil. Since then, the first Ukrainian firings of American ATACMS missiles have rapidly been followed by more intense use of drones and cluster missiles by Russia (resulting in numerous civilian casualties), as well as numerous bombardments aimed at depriving the country of electricity for the winter. Above all, the symbolic sending of an intermediate-range missile capable of carrying nuclear warheads demonstrates the Kremlin's growing desire to provoke and intimidate the Western powers. Putin, the sorcerer's apprentice, has just amended the Russian doctrine on the use of nuclear weapons.

Meanwhile, paradoxically, the Middle East has just opened up to negotiations following a ceasefire agreed by Netanyahu over Lebanon. And while the situation in Ukraine has not reached that point at the time of writing, and Putin “does not seem ready to negotiate”’, there are voices pointing out that it may now be “possible to envisage a just peace”[1]’.

‘Peace’ in capitalism is a delusion and a lie

Have the great imperialist powers and the belligerents become ‘reasonable’, more inclined to ‘restore peace’? Absolutely not! Marxism has always maintained, particularly since the First World War, that capitalism is war. A time of ‘peace’ is simply a time of preparation for imperialist war, the product of a political and military balance of power. As Lenin pointed out, ‘”the more the capitalists talk about peace, the more they prepare for war”’. If Netanyahu has today signed a fragile ceasefire in the north, it is above all in the hope of gaining Trump's support in order to capitalise politically on his atrocities in Palestinian territory and better position himself in the face of Iran's regional claims.

The appointment of former veteran Pete Hegseth to the post of US Secretary of Defence is also in line with Netanyahu's hopes. A star presenter on the conservative Fox News television channel, Hegseth, a hard-line evangelical conservative, presents himself as a ‘defender of Israel’, a supporter of Zionism who loudly applauded the decision to move the American embassy to Jerusalem as the capital of the Hebrew state. This future minister naturally supports Netanyahu in the face of pressure from international justice, all the more so as he had already pleaded in favour of American soldiers accused of war crimes! He was also the spokesman for those who wanted to bomb Iran on the pretext of its ‘arms caches ’...

In Ukraine, each side is also trying to anticipate Washington's reaction and is doing its utmost to score points on the ground, so as to be able to negotiate from a position of strength. On the one hand, there is the desperate pressure exerted by the Kremlin through indiscriminate bombing and the nuclear threat; on the other, in Ukraine, there is the determination to use the fragile conquest of the Russian region of Kursk as a ‘bargaining chip’. One thing is certain: whatever policy Trump decides to pursue, it is bound to fuel the same appetites for revenge.

The same applies to the European powers, caught up in the dynamic of every man for himself and confronted by the initiatives of increasingly audacious partners, such as the meeting between Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Vladimir Putin, but also by the revival of Franco-British discourse on the possibility of sending troops to Ukraine ‘to keep the peace’, whereas Germany is not in favour of this at the moment. A whole range of issues are poisoning relations in the EU, both over Russia and the war in Ukraine (Hungary, for example, is overtly pro-Russian) and in the Middle East (the question of the Palestinian state), as well as relations with NATO, the role of European defence, the development of the war economy, etc. The uncertainty of the results of the American elections, followed by the victory of Trump, who had pledged to “resolve the Ukrainian conflict in 24 hours”’, could only lead to further embers of war. Between now and 20 January, the date of Donald Trump's inauguration, no one knows what the new American President is likely to do, given his capricious, volatile and unpredictable nature.

The growing tensions will therefore continue, perhaps also in the form of ‘peace’ speeches. This dynamic of imperialist chaos, marked by major tensions between all the world's powers, first and foremost China and the United States, can only grow and spread, even if it is possible that a truce will momentarily mark the tempo. But war will not go away: “capitalism has no other way out in its attempt to hold together its different compo­nents, than to impose the iron strait-jacket of military force. In this sense, the methods it uses to try to contain an increasingly bloody state of chaos are themselves a factor in the aggravation of military barbarism into which capitalism is plunging”.[2] In order to defend its strategic interests, each imperialist state now increasingly applies a scorched earth policy, sowing chaos and destruction, even in the areas of influence of its closest ‘allies’ and, a fortiori, of its rivals. Left to its own devices, the capitalist system threatens the very survival of humanity.

Only the proletariat can offer an alternative to capitalist barbarity.

Acknowledging the obsolescence of capitalism does not mean giving in to fatalism. On the contrary! Within bourgeois society, there is an antagonistic force capable of bringing down this system: the massive international struggle of the proletariat. Even if the proletariat is still weakened and unable to take direct action against the war, its potential remains intact. Even if it is only gradually beginning to express itself through a slow process of awareness, fragile and uneven, still molecular and subterranean, it represents, for the future, a social force of radical transformation. Revolutionaries owe need to highlight the future potential contained in the class struggle: “The working class has no side to choose in all these wars, whether current or in the making, and must staunchly defend the banner of proletarian internationalism everywhere. For a whole period, the working class will not be able to stand up directly against war. On the other hand, the class struggle against exploitation will take on greater importance because it pushes the proletariat to politicise its struggle, with a view to overthrowing capitalism.”[3]

WH, 30 November 2024.

 

[1] Remarks by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres

 

[2] Orientation text: Militarism and decomposition International Review no. 64 (1991).

 

Rubric: 

Imperialist conflicts