The war Serbia and Kosovo is a capitalist war
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THE WAR SERBIA AND KOSOVO IS A CAPITALIST WAR
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The war Serbia and Kosovo is a capitalist war.
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The war Serbia and Kosovo is a capitalist war
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Here we are again, then! New bombings, new gunfire, new massacres: while we write, the NATO intervention in Serbia is under way, with the pretext of defending the Albanian population of Kosovo. We repeat what our press never ceased to proclaim in the past months.

The capitalist crisis, which is continuously and inexorably deepening, is exasperating every contrast, on a by now world theatre. The absolute need of capital to self-valorise (in order to resist the tendential fall of the median rate of profit) and the impossibility to do it properly (especially in the presence of such a crisis as the present one) make urgent and vital the control of raw material sources, of the roads through which they are carried, of the great trade routes, of the areas of commercial and strategic influence, on part of all the imperialist powers, be they big or small.

The whole world is in a growing state of tension. The trade war sees the US lined up on the one side (as the greatest imperialist power in the world) and on the other side its rivals: Germany and Japan (as the main candidates of a directly competitive role with regard to the US), France (in Africa), more generally Europe (more or less... dis-united!). In particular, the Balkans are and always were a crucial area. Non only for the important raw materials hidden in their underground. Not only as a crossroads of a lucrative drug and weapon trading, which in such a moment of economic crisis transforms itself in ever precious profits («money does not stink» always was a bourgeois catch-phrase: the outcome of coke or of anti-personnel mines, it is much welcome to the bourgeoisie!).

The control of such an area of access to the Mediterranean Sea, the theatre of the great trading routes and strategic manoeuvres, is of the utmost importance for countries such as Germany (already projecting in that direction, along the Austria-Slovenia-Croatia axis) and Russia (whose dramatic socio-economic situation pushes it to an ever closer relationship with Serbia, its historical ally, with the view to an outlet on the Mediterranean Sea - which would allow its shaky economy a new breath of air).

To hit this strategic area, to make it clear - by bombs and gunfire - that nothing can move in the Balkans in an anti-US direction, to slap publicly a Europe which would like to show itself compact and powerful, but which will be able to do so only under the iron heel of a capitalism ruling in the area (and such a capitalism will only be the German one, today still too weak - above all on the military level - to play that role completely) - this is the meaning and aim of such a new military adventure! Certainly not the defence of the Albanian population of Kosovo!

As always, on the one side and on the other of the war front, proletarians will continue to die and spit blood in the extraction of plus-labour. And as always the «masters of war» (the representatives on earth of god Capital) will continue to reap profits.

The trend - we kept repeating in all these years - is towards an exasperation of the trade war, towards a deepening of local and area conflicts, towards an ever more insidious rebirth of the lethal viruses of chauvinism and nationalism.

The trend is the inevitable one of a capitalism in crisis, which knows no other way out of its own violent contradictions, than that of war and forced destruction of what is in excess: commodities and labour. The trend is toward the preparation of a new world slaughter.

The European proletarians, the world proletarians, will have to learn again how to hold their destiny firmly in their own hands - to go back to struggle for their immediate interests (their living and working conditions) as well as for their historical ones (the demolition of a mode of production which is by now rotten in its very marrow), to free themselves of the paralysing influence of trade-union and political opportunism (which is openly arrayed in defence of national capitals), to avoid the traps of cowardly pacifism and of nationalism which breaks and destroys the class front.

Let's go back to open and full class war: against capital and its States, under the leadership of a world communist party, which must be born again if we really want to «storm the heavens», once and forever.

Source: «Internationalist Papers», number 8, spring/summer 1999.

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