Gaza: the hell of decomposing capitalism

The more time passes, the more atrocities accumulate, the more words fail to describe the open-air death camp that is Gaza. After the carnage carried out by Hamas on 7 October 2023, the Israeli response has exceeded all levels of barbarism. Most of the more than 50,000 deaths caused by the IDF's bombings and raids are civilians, children, defenceless proletarians. The Israeli army deliberately targets groups of civilians and vital infrastructure, including health facilities, forcing the population to migrate from one end of the gigantic prison that is Gaza to the other, abandoning everything they own in a desperate attempt to stay alive. As master of the enclave's borders, Israel cynically starves the population by restricting water and food supplies, prevents the entry of medicines and medical equipment essential for treating tens of thousands of wounded people, and methodically destroys everything that has been built there in an orgy of violence.

The ‘great Western democracies’ are issuing a string of horrified statements in response to the atrocities. They are using increasingly harsh words against the Israeli government, but are taking no action, such as stopping arms and ammunition deliveries, to stop the bloodshed. These are nothing but cries of outrage, and for good reason! From the massacres in Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam to the phosphorus bombing of the German cities of Dresden and Hamburg and the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Western countries, like all countries in the world, have never shied away from the most atrocious massacres to further their sordid interests. The anniversary of 8 May 1945, celebrated with great pomp and circumstance as the " victory over Nazi barbarism", expresses all the hypocrisy of the leaders of these democratic powers who are willing to accept the ongoing genocide, always ready to resort to lies and amnesia to hide the fact that their own hands are stained with the blood of the victims of colonial massacres and two world wars.

Behind the genocide in Gaza: the barbarism of capitalism

This barbarism unleashed by both sides, even if they are asymmetrical, can be seen at work all over the world: in Syria and Lebanon, Sudan and Yemen, India and Pakistan, Ukraine and Congo. Admittedly, the massacres in Gaza have their roots in 75 years of confrontation between the Israeli and Palestinian bourgeoisies and imperialist meddling in the Middle East, but they are based on a common origin shared by all conflicts, clearly stated by Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin at the beginning of the 20th century: with the entry of capitalism into its phase of historical decline, the era of “imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism” began. All capitalist states must now defend their interests at the direct expense of their international competitors. No state can escape this logic. Since no state can give up defending its place in the global market, all means are permitted, even the most despicable, barbaric and repugnant. The current period, the final phase of the system's decomposition, is only accentuating the escalation of barbarism. Thirty-five years ago, in our Theses on Decomposition, we already wrote that we are more and more seeing “the development of terrorism, or the seizure of hostages, as methods of warfare between states, to the detriment of the ‘laws’ that capitalism established in the past to ‘regulate’ the conflicts between different ruling class factions”. In Gaza, Hamas is using hostages as human shields to try to stem the Israeli military response, while the Israeli army is using the two million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip as bargaining chips with its Palestinian enemy. Each side is using threats against civilians in its struggle against its enemy.

Due to the growing political fragmentation of the bourgeois factions, a policy geared towards the coherent defence of the interests of the state is becoming increasingly difficult, if not impossible. This phenomenon, which exists in all countries, is reflected in a general policy of every man for himself pursued by a large part of the bourgeois political apparatus[1]. This every man for himself attitude is reflected in Israel by the fact that, in his desperate struggle for political survival, Netanyahu has become an uncontrolled projectile for the American godfather, at the head of a government that includes irresponsible extreme right-wing Zionist factions that no longer hide their intention to implement a ‘final solution’ to the Palestinian problem, a government that no longer even pretends to take into consideration the lives of hostages held by Hamas or those of Palestinian civilians, in the West Bank as in Gaza. All that remains is a nihilistic rush towards barbarism, which can only end in the physical elimination, through massacre or exile, of all Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. This is fundamentally the same logic as that of Hamas, that of all ruling classes, all of whom are the embodiment of repression and militarism: hostages, dead or alive, have never prevented the people of Gaza from suffering atrocious reprisals, nor Hamas from committing crimes and exercising its own repression against Palestinians demonstrating to stop the carnage!

This is clearly the future that capitalism has in store for us: the mass slaughter of civilians in wars that spare no one, the appetite for pure revenge, the extermination of political opponents and enemy factions, the total destruction of entire cities, hospitals and schools, the development of totally irrational ideologies based on religion, conspiracy theories and mistrust of everyone and everything. The end result is the destruction of all organised life for the whole of humanity, and we can already see that this cancer eating away at capitalism has metastasised all over the planet.

The only alternative to this destructive dynamic is the development of the proletarian struggle against the human, economic, social and cultural sacrifices imposed by this decaying society. The proletariat is the only class whose perspective is diametrically opposed to that of the bourgeoisie. More than ever, the only future for humanity lies in the hands of the working class, the only revolutionary class under capitalism. It alone, through its struggle that knows no borders, is capable of defending a potentially redeeming principle: that of proletarian internationalism. In Gaza as elsewhere, in the face of increasingly numerous and bloody imperialist confrontations, there is no camp, no belligerent to support.

HD, 25 May 2025

 

 

 

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[1] The rise to power of the Trump gang in the United States is one expression of this, but we find more or less the same situation in South Korea, Argentina and almost all European countries.