The
real aims of imperialist wars
‘There are wars
and wars. Revolutionary wars are also possible. Therefore it is necessary to
make it clear that in this case we are dealing precisely with an imperialist
war. This is obvious, but to avoid false interpretations, so that one is not
misunderstood, one must say it openly and clearly’. (Lenin, Collected Works,
vol. 34).
The imperialist countries make war in
order to control the oil, gold, copper, water, in short, the natural and mineral
wealth of the peoples, the raw materials, and in order to dominate the markets.
Let us examine the reasons for the imperialist wars of recent years.
Asia’s
oil is the main objective of the imperialist war against Afghanistan
To get hold of the uranium, gas and
oil of Afghanistan is one of the objectives that U.S. and English imperialism is
carrying out with the war against Afghanistan. Therefore, one of the objectives
of that war of aggression is to seize the wealth of that country. In fact, the
world’s biggest oil companies, U.S. and English (Shell, Exxon-Mobil, Texaco,
etc.), who own almost all the oil in the world, have always wanted to control
Asia’s oil. Even though it is a poor country, Afghanistan possesses various
kinds of mineral wealth, immense fields of natural gas, uranium and even oil,
which have not yet been exploited. Besides, Afghanistan is in a strategic region
of Central Asia. The countries there have huge quantities of oil underground.
There are five countries in the Caspian Sea basin (Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Iran,
Russia and Turkmenistan). To get an idea of the wealth of those countries, one
should note that the Caspian Sea basin has reserves calculated at 200 billion
barrels of oil and that Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan alone have more oil and gas
than all the countries of the Persian Gulf. Some of the U.S. companies have
multimillion-dollar agreements with those countries to exploit their reserves.
Furthermore: war is the quickest way
for the capitalists to shore up the seriously shaken world economy, particularly
the U.S. economy. In the era of imperialism, war is the most efficient way of
getting the capitalist economies out of crisis. That is why there are so many
wars in the world, with bourgeois governments always finding pretexts to declare
new ones.
In the war against Yugoslavia alone,
the U.S. government has spent more than US $12 billion; those who profited were
the military-industrial complexes of the big powers. That is, the magnates of
the arms industry gained billions of dollars from the devastation of Yugoslavia.
As soon as the war against Afghanistan
began, the value of the shares of various U.S. arms manufacturers (such as
Lockheed, Northrop, General Dynamics, etc.) rose quickly in the stock market.
Thus, 29 days after the bombardment of the people of Afghanistan began, the
value of the stocks of those companies rose an average of 41.69% in the New York
Stock Exchange. The demand for durable goods rose 12.8% in October of 2001,
driven by the purchase of products related to the arms industry. This was its
greatest increase since 1992.
The big U.S. companies that benefited
from the imperialist wars include Raytheon, manufacturer of the Tomahawk
missile; Lockheed Martin, which developed the Patriot missile system; Boeing
North American, which specializes in target detection; Northrop Grumman,
airplane manufacturer; Atlantic Research, which manufactures rocket motors;
Honeywell, installer of tracking systems; Motorola, which manufactures
resistors; and UDS, which fits out and reequips military vessels.
Besides that, the U.S. military
budget, before the war began, was US $291.2 billion. After the attacks on the
WTC it jumped to US $329 billion and, in April of 2002, it exceeded US $379
billion. Thus, in a few months, the military budget had grown by US $90 billion,
all for a war against a country in which half the population goes hungry. In
conclusion: the monopolies of the U.S. war industry were the greatest
beneficiaries of the attacks of September 2001 in the U.S.
Why
is there an imperialist war against the Palestinian and Iraqi peoples?
In the struggles for control of the
sources of the raw material, the most important is the struggle for oil. The
Persian Gulf region contains nearly half of the world’s oil reserves; Iraq
alone possesses about 10% of these. Of the total oil consumed in the U.S.,
nearly 10% comes from the Persian Gulf region. To subjugate Iraq is to control
reserves estimated at 200 billion barrels of oil. Therefore, the reason that the
U.S. is undertaking the war against Iraq is simply to seize the oil reserves of
that country, to satisfy the interests of its monopolies. This is happening in
the Middle East and Central Asia, where the world’s greatest deposits of oil
are found and the U.S. wants to maintain control of the flow of oil coming from
that region.
The main reason for the war against
the Palestinian people is that Israel is located in the most important
geo-strategic area of the world for the interests of U.S. capitalism. Besides,
the State of Israel has been continually entrusted by the USA to teach the most
advanced torture techniques and train the death squads of various repressive
governments, as it did in Latin America in the ’70s and ’80s, and – as
everything indicates – it is doing it again.
In fact, Israel would never have been
able to colonize and subjugate Palestine if it did not have the unconditional
support of the biggest military power on the planet, the U.S., and of the other
imperialist countries. In fact, Israel receives more financial and military aid
from the U.S. than any other country, getting three billion dollars a year. But
it is not only that: Germany and France are, after the U.S., the two countries
that export the most war material to Israel.
Imperialist
terrorism against the peoples of Latin America
For a long time, the U.S. has been
planning, financing and carrying out interventions and coups in the Americas.
Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Mexico and Brazil are, without a doubt, the
victims that suffered most from the open intervention of the U.S. in recent
years.
The International Consortium of
Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) stated that the U.S. presence in Colombia is
currently larger than what it had been in El Salvador in 1980. The Colombian
army, for example, received US $70 million from the U.S. in 2000, and in 2001
that figure jumped to US $519.2 million. Three large transnationals, BP, OXY and
Total, have invested huge amounts of dollars in Colombia. BP hired 500 soldiers
and 50 officers of the Colombian army to protect its oil installations (Resumen,
March/April 2001). In this way, Plan Colombia was initiated by a lobby of U.S.
businessmen interested in the Colombian oil reserves.
Between 1984 and 1992, 512 soldiers
were sent from Mexico to the U.S. for training. Since 1996 the U.S. has already
held classes for 4,000 Mexicans soldiers. It is important to remember that the
School of the Americas, formed to train officers of the Latin American armies to
fight against the revolution, was reopened and renamed the Western Hemispheric
Institute for Security Cooperation. All this is taking place at the same time as
they are building military bases in our continent, such as in Manta, Ecuador,
and in Alcântara, in northeast Brazil, and they are organizing military coups
in Venezuela and Argentina. The military presence and military expenses of the
U.S. in Latin America have grown in the last years, in the provision of weapons,
equipment, technical assistance in the field of intelligence and training in all
our countries. Officially 5,400 troops were trained in 1988 in various countries
(the U.S. has military bases in Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Europe; in south Korea
and Japan alone there are nearly 100 thousand U.S. soldiers).
The truth is that, whether due to the
sharpening of the anti-imperialist contradictions, or due to its fantastic
natural and mineral wealth and its huge market, Latin America today is one of
the main regions that the imperialist countries desire to control. Thus, the
monstrous Plan Colombia is far more than just about U.S. intervention in the
internal affairs of Colombia. It is a matter of a strategy set in motion to
establish the total and complete domination of Latin America by the U.S.
monopoly capitalists. And part of that strategy is the creation of new military
bases to guarantee the viability of the FTAA (Free Trade Agreement of the
Americas) as well as the attempt to annihilate the advance and growth of the
revolutionary struggle of the Colombian people.
The pro-imperialist coup d’etat in
Venezuela last April, financed and directed by the U.S., has made clear the
policy of U.S. imperialism to guarantee and deepen its domination in Latin
America. This is being done by the installation, once again, of open military
dictatorships to guarantee its interests in the region. To reinforce the policy
of installation of military dictatorships, in June of 1999, the World Bank,
after carrying out a 'survey' in 80 countries, divulged a report in which one of
the conclusions was that 'there is no evidence that democracy helps the poor
more.'
Not just that. The report also shows
that the real role of the communications media in our countries is to serve as
propaganda for the international bourgeoisie and the big national bourgeoisie
against the people and the national interests. Therefore, only the popular and
workers’ struggles in the streets can really defeat the bourgeoisie and win
socialism.
The
imperialist war against Yugoslavia
The U.S., Germany, France, England,
Italy and 14 other countries, led by U.S. imperialism, bombed the people of
Yugoslavia for more than two months, under the pretext of defending the rights
of the Albanian people of Kosovo. The real interests that they defended in that
war were, in the first place, the interests of the war industry monopolies of
the imperialist countries, and in second place, the economic and political
interests of the imperialist countries, in particular the U.S. and Germany, to
extend their control over the Balkans. Previously, that region was made up of
socialist countries that formed the Warsaw Pact, which was opposed to the
capitalist countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
The real interest of imperialism,
therefore, was not to defend the population of Kosovo, but to seize the wealth
that exists there. The Balkans are rich in oil and have large deposits of
chromium, nickel, copper, gold and platinum. What the U.S., Germany and other
imperialist countries want is to seize that wealth and exploit it in accord with
their interests. To carry out this objective, they need to install a puppet
government in Yugoslavia, one submissive to the monopolies and the international
banks. In other words, the imperialist governments and countries of England,
France, Germany, Italy and the U.S. carried out the war against the Yugoslav
people to satisfy their interests of pillage.
Another objective of the imperialist
war against Yugoslavia was to extend the limits of NATO to the borders of Russia
in order to later subjugate her totally. It is no longer news that the U.S.
wants to exercise still greater control over the whole European continent. Thus
what is behind that geo-politics of imperialism is the hegemonic control of the
Mediterranean Sea, of the straits region (the Bosphorus, Sea of Marmora and the
Dardanelles Straits) and of the Black Sea, within the perspective of a Third
World War.
Apparently Germany and the U.S. have
made a pact to delineate their respective spheres of influence in a civilized
manner and decide who colonizes what in the Balkan region. But those who think
that such a pact will last forever and that the U.S. and Germany will respect it
‘until death, are mistaken. The intense participation of Germany in that
region since the Bosnian war makes clear what the interests of German
imperialism are in the Balkans.
In fact imperialism, in its highest
and final stage, is characterized, as Lenin said, by reaction all along the
line. In that sense, violence and war are inseparable from capitalism in this
epoch. Furthermore: under the conditions of the general crisis of capitalism,
the imperialist circles are trying to resolve the fall in the rate of profit,
the reduction of markets and the shortage of raw materials by increasing the
slavery of the dependent peoples and the ferocious exploitation of the workers.
Therefore, they constantly need to further militarise their States, that is,
they need fascism. In fact, as Dimitrov defined it very well, ‘fascism is the
most open, most imperialist, terrorist dictatorship of finance capital’
(Dimitrov, Workers Unity Against Fascism). Therefore we are witnessing, in a
series of countries (France, Italy, Germany, the U.S., Holland, Austria, among
many other), the appearance of increasingly fascistic governments. It is
important to emphasize, however, the role of shock troops of world fascism that
the U.S. dictator, George W. Bush, is playing. In fact, by enormously increasing
military expenses, financing and carrying out military coups, intervening in
various countries and unleashing imperialist wars all over the planet, the
United States dictator is at the head of the greatest reaction in capitalism, in
world terrorism.
Modern
imperialist war is for the control of oil and the sources of strategic raw
materials
It is not for no reason that U.S.
imperialism has such an interest in oil, the main raw material for the operation
of the world economy. The U.S., Europe and Japan consume 52% of the oil
extracted on the planet, although they make up barely 13% of the world’s
population. The United States alone consumes 25.5% of the world’s oil
production. Moreover: the U.S. has reserves sufficient for only another ten
years, and its production has fallen since 1999 (Review of World Energy).
However, what is even more serious is
that if the present rate of consumption of oil is maintained, it is predicted
that, in 2020, two-thirds of the reserves of the world’s fossil fuels will be
exhausted. In an economy where various sectors – airline companies, automobile
industries and fertilizers – depend on generators of electric energy (in the
U.S. the main source of energy is fossil fuels) – it is imperative to lower
the price of oil in order to get the country out of recession.
Also, it is important to remember that
Venezuela is the world’s fourth largest producer of oil and that 75% of the
refining and trade in this product is in the hands of three monopoly
enterprises, Exxon-Mobil (U.S.), BP Amoco (English-U.S.) and Shell
(English-Dutch).
There, then, is the real reason for
the voracity of the large oil companies and the imperialist countries: the
domination of countries to take possession of the sources of that raw material
which is of strategic importance for the world economy.
Capitalism
increases the number of wars in the world
With the capitalist economy becoming
continually more dependent and subordinated to the arms industry, wars have been
growing in number and intensity all over the planet. In the last decade of the
20th century alone two million children died in armed conflicts, five million
became invalids and another 12 million lost their homes. Every month, more than
two thousand people die or become invalids due to mine explosions.
The wars are presented as
‘humanitarian’ wars when in reality they are wars for economic and strategic
interests, they are imperialist wars. Surprisingly, even the World Bank, after
analysing 47 wars that have taken place in the world since 1965, came to the
conclusion that when one of the main sources of wealth of a country is the
export of a raw material, the risk of conflict is the greatest (El País, June
16, 2000).
These, then, are the real reasons for
the imperialist wars that are taking place in the world today. These are the
reasons that the powerful and lying bourgeois media try to conceal in their
disinformation news. The more wars that break out, the more bombardments that
occur, the greater will be the profits of the monopolies. It does not matter, as
it has never mattered to the capitalists and their governments, if children die,
if schools are bombed, if a whole people is destroyed. The capitalist owners of
the arms industries, just like vampires, are cruel, bloodthirsty, cold and
calculating murderers; they are the real terrorists with suits and ties.
Capitalist
imperialism and socialist revolution
‘The furious struggle among
capitalist groups is the cause of imperialist wars, that is to say, of wars for
conquest of foreign territories, and this leads to their mutual weakening’
(Stalin, Foundations of Leninism).
As the history of the humanity over
last five centuries has shown, the capitalists have always violently defended
their ‘right’ to continue exploiting the people. Imperialism is waging a
permanent war against the peoples who rise up against that domination, to
prevent them from freeing themselves. To pretend, therefore, that the
bourgeoisie will peacefully give up power and the means of production under its
control is a vain illusion. Surely there is no other road to put an end to
exploitation and to defend the interests of the workers against the exploiters,
than to carry out a revolution.
Therefore, every day it becomes more
evident to the workers that is impossible to free themselves from their
ferocious and brutal exploitation without a determined struggle and without
carrying out a revolution against the base which has generated and given birth
to the world system of financial slavery, capitalism. Therefore Lenin, summing
up in one sentence his whole analysis of the epoch of imperialism, declared:
‘Imperialism is the eve of the social revolution of the proletariat. In fact,
the contradictions of capitalism, and particularly the contradiction between the
bourgeoisie and the proletariat, make socialism the only alternative to solve
the crisis and save humanity.
Therefore, it is also necessary to
build a vanguard detachment of the working class, a party that marches forward,
that is steeled in the fire of the class struggle and that revives the true
revolutionary doctrine of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin. A party that conducts
its work so that the working class and the popular masses become conscious of
the need for the revolution and the seizure of power.
Comrades,
As continuers and heirs of the Paris
Commune of 1871, of the Great October Socialist Revolution of 1917, which
established the first victorious State of workers and peasants in the world, of
the heroic Cuban Revolution of 1959 and of the Popular Uprising of 1935 in
Brazil, we are called upon to employ our force to the maximum in carrying
forward the struggles for the liberation of the Brazilian people and for the
establishment of true democracy in our country, socialism. Surely, it is this
role that each of the members of the Revolutionary Communist Party, the party
founded by the hero of the workers, Manoel Lisboa de Moura, will fulfil.
Communism lives! Long live communism!
CC of the Revolutionary Communist
Party of Brazil (PCR)