THE MOTHER OF ALL THE BATTLES
Darkened by the events of the war, the complexes causes were lost quickly. In the modern societies, the capitalist economy is the mother of all the things and, in that same measure, is also the mother of all the battles. The personal motivations and the ideological reasons cannot be explained without having in mind the objectivity of the world capitalism development. The Iraq’s war differs from the wars of world order mainly by the fact that it no longer happens under the sign of the great apparent prosperity of the financial bubbles. The drop in the stock exchange has not only annihilated a monetary capital of astronomical proportions, determining this way a circumstantial debility to planetary scale, but rather, as a consequence of it, it has caused a deep crisis of the bank and insurance systems.
The melting of the countable values of actions opens gigantic holes in the balances and in the own capitals, while the torrent of crashes leaves behind it a trail of morose credits of similar dimensions to those that were already verified in Japan and in the Asian southeast, although this time, also inside the UE and the USA. At the same time the flow of taxes, rates and bonus of insurance threat with dry off even more. The systems of social security vacillate as much as the architecture of the commercial finances. Already in February there was a "secret encounter" among the German federal chancellor, Gerhard Schröeder, with representatives of the banks directions, in which it was intended, following the Japanese example, the foundation of a state society of shelter of the morose credit (Bad Bank") in order to avoid a dramatic worsening of the banks crisis in RFA. And as the crisis feeds the crisis, the second and main repercussion on the real economy is no longer far. At this moment, the circumstantial planetary debility possibly won't give place to a next recovery, but to a great world depression.
To this general problem, is superimposed the specific crisis scenario of the last world potency, that is to say, USA, that long ago have been winning form and impulse that is already a general knowledge. The military apparatus of high technology, without competition in the world, not only is not able to pacify the barbarism and the violence in the global regions in disintegration, but rather he has itself muddy feet from the economical point of view. The internal and external USA indebtedness, without historical precedent, long ago had overcame all that could be reasonable. Only the constant affluence of monetary capital maintains alive an apparent economy that, as compensation, devours the wealth of this world by a surplus of equally unprecedented imports. It has already been said many times: at this moment, this is the oxygen ball that the world joint has. Although the financial bubble of the USA still didn't shrink as much as the Asian and theEuropean ones, the collapse is profiled in the horizon.
Before this situation, it can be explained a politics of global emergency that emanates from the centre, that is to say from USA, and in whose breast, seemingly unconnected moments are articulated. The Iraq’s war is part of this lot that make believe according to everything that it won't be more than an exit kick. It is supposed that the indiscriminate use of the violence apparatus of high technology will reaffirm the control pretence to global scale and will force a continuous flow of monetary capital. Since the petroleum plays an important role, less than an effort to make sure the corresponding reservations, what would be also possible without appealing to the war, it is an option dedicated to stabilize the financial markets by a drastic reduction of its price, what could ruin as much the countries of the OPEC as Russia. Simultaneously, this crisis "solution" will be accompanied by a bigger globalisation of the capital under the aegis of the USA, imposed with all rigor, and for the aware destruction of all systems of social and ecological security in the entire world that are associated to it. If it was necessary that some of the big western banks crumble, with the consequences to the real economy, this will happen outside the USA. A politics of crisis brutalized in such a way also implies necessarily the destruction of the existent system of legitimation until today (UN, international right).
The lack of understanding of Chirac, Schröeder and Putin with the USA’s administration are not framed in any way inside a traditional schema of national and imperial competition by manpower (there is not even a tiny piece of it!), markets, raw material and "influence spheres". What is at stake is rather the "how" of the global regime of crisis. The agreement is general in what concerns to the liquidation of all and each one of thesocial rights. However, and contrarily to the politics of the USA, one part of the UE governments has scruples facing the eventuality of the establishment of a direct military USA’s dictatorship in the Near East and in the global regions in disintegration, as well as facing the intentional ruin of the OPEC and mainly Russia. Also, before institutional resistances and in order to being able to carry out easier the liquidation of the social systems, they also want to save certain cracks of the legitimation system, as much the national states as international level, and the coherence in terms of political economy (see the "Bad Bank" example).
At the same time, nevertheless, they know exactly that in all aspects they depend for their survival on the USA that absorb as much the flows of the monetary capital as those of the goods by their extreme indebtedness, maintaining this way the appearance of successful appraisement processes. A collapse of the economy of the USA and a bigger debility of the dollar, far from strengthening the power of the UE, would drag it behind by the collapse of the export structures; besides that the Europeans, during several decades, would be unable to establish an independent military control on the processes of global crisis. It is for that reason that the less scrupulous and more reactionary part of the "global players" of the financial capital and of the political class stake fully for the "hawks" of the Bush administration. A transnational capitalism of crisis and minority should exercise, with the armoured fist of the national military apparatus of the last world power, its regime of global terror that is giving place to the pure and simple irrationality.
This means the hatching of the hopeless contradiction between the globalisation of the capitalist economy and the construction of the capitalist politics essentially linked to the frame of the national state.The "axis" Paris-Berlin-Moscow, already fragile, doesn't constitute a real alternative neither in external terms, nor in internal terms. Any politics that today has achieved a mere limitation of the damages inside the unalterable limits of the valid world order paying the price of a growing social exclusion and repression is condemned to the failure. While people don't become emancipated from their capitalist domestication, in the breast of absolutely independent social movements, they will continue being only masses manipulable by the different variants of the global regime of crisis.
German original: "Die Mutter aller Schlachten", in Neues Deutschland, Berlin, April 2003. Available in www.krisis.org Translation into the Portuguese by Lumir Nahodil: http://planeta.clix.pt/obeco Portuguese-Spanish Translation: Round Desk. Translation Spanish-English: Contracorriente m.vallseca@telefonica.net