Class War is Nothing New

Those who are aware of the concept of class war often think that this is a relatively recent phenomenon, but nothing could be further from the truth. Today, it is particularly acute and it is the elite that are at war against humanity; the working class and land working peasants, for their own profit. It is an undeclared war by and large, which makes it appear less obtrusive and apparent thus making it more covert and sinister. They have been at it for a long time and effect this war by covert means. In fact, it is so deep rooted, almost all of us accept this perpetual war as a normal state of affairs. The outward symptom of the disease of this kind of civilization effected by brutality, is our incessant nationalistic wars that have been going on ever since people, lead by bullies have carved up territories in competition for resources and the surplus. At one time, the impact on the environment was only slight, but today, it is entirely different. Measurements of ice cores show that the greatest impact occurred during the Roman imperialist era prior to our current era that has not only far surpassed this in impact, but has added far more toxins than were ever produced by the Roman impact at its height. Other than these two peak impacts, all others were naturally based. The worst assaults of all against the environment as well as against the masses by war, have their roots in the beginning of WWI that began in 1914. From that time on, the impact by current imperialism far exceeds the height of the Roman era. Notwithstanding, it is also accelerating year by year.

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”

Thus wrote Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in the preamble to the Communist Manifesto (1). The main theme of the civilized ages has been class war, in which events like the Indian wars, Russian-Japanese war, WWI, the China-Japanese war, WWII, the Korean War, Vietnam War and all Middle Eastern conflicts for regime change since 2003 have been battles and skirmishes. In fact, we can confidently say that the 6,000 year long class war, is THE WORLD WAR; the real “Mother of all battles” and that WWI and WWII should be more aptly called WWII and WWIII. But that is one interpretation as what is commonly referred to as WWI and WWII blended together as one great conflagration, shifting and moving around, from Europe to Russia and then back to Europe. In this interpretation, the class war (WWI), beginning at the dawn of history to the current epoch of the developed countries against the resource rich developing countries has been the major conflict event that has waged almost unbroken across the face of the earth in greater and lesser extent. It has always been a war fought on all levels, encompassing all fields, of the rulers over the ruled, of the megalomaniac tyrant over the oppressed. The great wars that we all talk about through history are but minor battles and skirmishes in the context of a far greater all encompassing ages long and world wide perpetual event. It was, is now and will be, over growing space and resources for as long as it is allowed to continue. It is mediated through devices like duplicity, superstition/religion, laws, science, xenophobia, developments in superior technology and ignorance. All wars thrive on genocide and the ruin of whole regions in the brutal business of extracting resources and the surplus from its victims. The modern era sees a quantitative development in the ruination of vast tracts of the earth, such as the use of agent orange in Vietnam and depleted uranium in Iraq and Libya. The Romans by comparison, used salt to destroy crop fields; a far cry from the toxins of today, some of which are permanent. Every tool and advance has been pressed into the service of creating for destruction in order to maintain the status quo, which has also been the most profitable and also most destructive industry on the planet. Though the rulers talk of peace, they always prepare and act on war. The ruled are tricked or forced into the conflicts of someone else's making and profit and to their own collective injury, misery and death for the gain of the rulers. In this profiteering mix of everlasting torture and brutality, money managers and lenders enter and rake in huge profits from interest generating loans. Loans are made to entire countries, the industrial-military complex with the cooperation of governments on all levels. Working people of all craft, skilled and unskilled disciplines, work incredibly hard to pay huge taxes and interest payments to finance their own torture and mass execution. The people are worked beyond carrying capacity to maintain this evil and kept ignorant of the real goings on. Bread and circuses, also mediated on extreme cruelty and brutality prove a vicarious escape from the real agony. Watching someone else's agony appears to be a temporary relief from one's own agony. Truly, the ignorance of the working class of peoples is the bliss of the rulers. War has always been highly profitable one way or another alongside that greatest of all deceptions, organized religion. Whether we look at specific conflicts in history, it is always the same. When we peer behind the mechanisms of this evil exercise, we find the speculator and the profit hunter; the manipulators of history for their own gain to the collective loss for all else; people, animals and the environment.

Pollution to the end of driving the class war is the by-product of capitalist mode of production that seeks maximum profit with minimal expense. Pollution also results from overproduction and planned obsolescence. The garbage of warfare is perhaps one of the worst polluters going, especially when we see the likes of nuclear testing and the Kuwait oil fires of 1991. In addition, the planet is being ruined with the use of depleted uranium on unwitting populations. Like diamonds in the arena of love, depleted uranium in the arena of pollution is forever! Pollution is endemic in every field of capitalist endeavour, which scours the earth bald in a bid to seize everything for profit. Although there are rigorous laws in first world nations to control pollution due to reformist policies, free trade laws allow development in third world nations with little or no control on pollution due to development and extraction of raw resources. Big business however, always manages to find a work around to avoid cleaning up their garbage, as this would completely erase profits. In Ecuador, oil extraction means pollution of the surrounding land that has a direct negative result on the health of the indigenous aboriginals who live, hunt and gather near refineries. In Angola, the same types of conditions exist. Angola, despite its natural wealth, is one of the poorest countries in Africa simply due to transnational bourgeois greed. The poor hunt, gather and fish as from ancient times. The wealth goes to a handful of people while 90 percent of the people live in abject poverty and filthy squalor.

Pollution is created with virtually no control, spreading disease and toxicity to the people and nature; the only thing that trickles down. In Angola, the oil being extracted and refined is protected by razor wire and land mines behind fences to keep the local people out. The oil refinery workers are unwitting pawns in the whole business and sometimes become the victims of local rage while the elite are tucked away safe from all harm, protected by a phalanx of armed goons and bullies and tricky shyster legality. This is direct proof of the class war that the bourgeoisie and their predecessors have always fought against the working people. Though a handful of measures and public relations advertising are implemented to make the capitalist oil robber barons look good, deeper digging finds that people work for food, just like in war torn Iraq. Education is designed to make people compliant. The countryside is littered with the smashed implements of war and towns are in bullet and bomb riddled ruin due to imperialist interests via hired mercenaries and proxy rebel wars. The very latest casualties in this type of conflict are Libya, Syria, Iraq (again) and Yemen. The bourgeoisie has an unpublicized trade going in Africa; raw resources out and weapons of war in. In fact, when 12 ecologists protested against Shell Oil for their pollution of fishing waters in Nigeria they were captured, framed on criminal charges and publicly hung. This fact of greedy exploitation is also found in gold, diamond and heavy metal mines in Africa as well as elsewhere in the world. Economic apartheid is still alive and well in much of Africa despite the so called abolition of apartheid in the political arena. The later is an exercise in public relations. New additions to the bourgeois consumerist capitalist society only add to the woes. Yet means exist to run civilization with a minimum of pollution, but this is too costly for capitalists robbing them of their power, expropriated surpluses and self aggrandizement.

Capitalism needs constant renewal and expansion to keep the cycle of profit going, hence the need for things like power grids, fossil fuels, disease and war. If someone came up with a way to generate “free energy”, capitalism would face ruin, because that would knock down one of the main ideological pillars that props up capitalism and its methodology. Free energy would break the cycle of fossil fuel dependence and profiteering thereby. It would threaten the “necessity of wars”. It would open the door to restore the environment and bring peace. Such things have periodically threatened capitalism and its guardians, the bourgeois class throughout history. Typically,when the threat was recognized, the response was usually swift and brutal. The choice given is either accept a buyout and shut up or be killed and your discovery sequestered or destroyed. This has happened repeatedly throughout the 19^th, 20^th and now 21^st centuries. Instead, green alternatives offered are expensive, clunky and more like grandiose and inefficient toys. Another lynchpin of capitalist profiteering is to keep the masses chained to a grid upon which they become utterly dependant, such as the electrical grid, the pipeline, gas pump, banks, roads and the like. Modern slavery is made of this!

Capitalism and a healthy planet for all living things cannot co-exist due to the intrinsic contradiction to the established order of the bourgeoisie. This means that in order to have a healthy planet, capitalism has to be removed from interfering with everything and everyone. Attempts in history within universal class war have been made, but so far have met with failure because capitalism was not removed globally. Working people have risen up time and time again in a bid to regime change the world order, but so far this has failed. Starting with the French Revolution (1789-1792), which was inspired by the American Revolution (1776-1783), we see the bourgeoisie and middle classes taking the state and power from the monarchy and church with the aid of the small labour force and peasants. The revolutions were seized by these bourgeois forces and the workers were unwitting instruments of that seizure, later betrayed by the leading forces. Then there are the smaller European attempts at revolution in the mid 19th century that were crushed by the bourgeoisie, such as the Paris Commune of 1871. In 1905 there was the first attempt at a Russian revolution and 12 years later, the successful revolution in the same country. Even there, the bourgeoisie attempted to crush it, succeeding only under Stalin’s capitulation to “socialism in one country.” In 1989, the deformed workers states started to collapse and fall apart under the pressures imposed by that chief capitalist state, the US. By 1992, it was history. The 1989 turning point in this history is important as the old war between Christendom and Islam was reawakened in 1990 and became hot in early 1991 with Desert Storm. After 9-11-01 false flag, the middle east conflict really took off. Between the initial success of the USSR and its demise arose a number of degenerate workers states modelled on the degeneracy of Stalin’s philosophy and “socialism in one country.” Of these, we see N. Vietnam, China, N. Korea, and Cuba still in existence, but with problems of their own. China is drifting more and more toward capitalism though clinging to the name of communism. Peasants are being driven off the land with nowhere to go for the sake of industrialization and the war effort. Cuba’s leader, Castro is near to death and already forces are lining up to “reclaim” Cuba for capitalism, but is meeting with stiff resistance from the heroic Cuban people. N. Korea can’t feed itself and corruption runs rife in the power structure. Only North Vietnam seems to have the fewest problems, but is courting the tourist dollar to prop up its economy. In every scenario, the problem is identical. There is an attempt to run a workers state in the midst of surrounding hostile sea of capitalism. And capitalists put the squeeze through embargoes, sanctions, blockades, stirring up civil dissent and false flags one way or another on all of them with the ultimate goal of conquest. Therefore, the success of any workers’ revolution in present and/or future is entirely dependent on being globally international in extent. Anything less is bound for failure. Although it can be argued that monarchies and theocracies exist today, they are also scrutinized and controlled by capitalist imperialistic designs. A number of theocratic revolutions also erupted mainly in the Muslim world, but these are no solutions to the class war that engulfs the entire planet. Theocratic, Monarchist, colour and such “revolutions” do not favour the common person one iota and are as such, reactions that look to the past instead of looking to the future. In fact, they form a crucial part in supporting the existing imperialism in the world as they are manipulated to fight among themselves, making the job of outside manipulation easier.

Various “leaders” of many political leanings suggest they will lead the workers to

the insurrection and the post insurrectionist world. This is something that has already been done in history to the detriment of the working class. IT was true in the bourgeois revolution of France and the bourgeois Republic that was the foundation of the US. Many point out that leadership requires training, which is true. The working class in the main is not educated to run the affairs of state and business, and this is done deliberately. An ignorant population is much easier to manipulate and control for any desired end than an educated working class. The educating of the working class lesson of the 1960’s is what stands behind the dumbing down of post 1980’s degeneration of capitalist society. Schooling under the imperialist capitalist world order is more about indoctrination and pro-capitalist propaganda. But, one crucial reality exists and that is, the world's working people have their hands on the levers of industry. This vast, but unconscious power can be a direct threat to the standing imperialist world order if the working class but awakens to its destiny for the future of humanity and the planet.

As for “revolutionary leaders,” here we get into the role of education under capitalist society and how many of these leaders have been indoctrinated under that pro capitalist system. Fortunately, education is no longer restricted to capitalist universities and colleges. Increasingly, workers have the opportunity to self educate. They need only encouragement and interest will take care of the rest, but the negativity engendered under oppressive state and religious pedagogy must be overcome. Under capitalism, education is all about command and obey, the failure complex and selective training for ones script, job and role under the rule of the bourgeoisie, the maintaining and protection of self declared private property and rights to any and all surpluses over which the class war is being fought. After all; all great concentrated wealth and power originated through theft and robbery from the very beginning and economic based fraud in the current era is rampant and serves as the primary means of dispossession.

Some workers are naturally curious as curiosity is not restricted by class distinction, privilege or divisions. These people naturally seek out information especially that which is censored, restricted or kept out of reach. From these workers come those that will lead the rest in a true working class international and global revolution. Also, many workers are pre-trained in the running of the machinery of the state and will form a necessary and integral function in the world transformation at hand. Part of that transformation will be toward a planned economy that works in harmony with nature instead of exploiting it for greatest individual gain. New ways prohibited under profiteering will be put to use to work with nature instead of against it and to move the working people forward to their true destiny; that of ultimate freedom and peace, with bread and land for all according to need. Cities and megalopolises as they exist now are a means to concentrate productive forces in a tiny area. Most people trapped there have no sure means to survive on their own when the corporations abandon them due to the anarchy of capitalism, an advancement of technology or the flight of companies to a cheaper labour market. The future is to decentralize and be local in production for the needs of all. Trade for non-locally available resources will still exist as it always has. Production will be tied to need and not to greed.

Revolution by the entire global workforce is necessary, run and led by working people for world wide regime change. This is the only thing that will succeed in making the necessary change away from capitalism. This must be entirely done by the workers of the world and not led by any pretenders to an enlightened new age of which there are many. These same people bear an unmistakable mark that is identical to that of the capitalists and that is dividing the workers along various lines, making out that each is the enemy of the others. This ultimately leads to placing workers in a divide against one another and perpetuates that most monstrous ways of capitalist profiteering, which is the long standing class war still underway. We, the workers of the world must turn as a block against the real enemies of the working class no matter how they profess themselves to the contrary. Actions speak louder than words and acts we must judge and to action commit!

References:

1. The Communist Manifesto