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FRANCESCO FRANCESCAGLIA – RESP. FOR THE FOREIGN AFFAIRS DEPT.PARTY OF THE ITALIAN COMMUNISTS (DELHI 20TH NOVEMBER 2009)

The global crisis of capitalism, that started more than a year ago, was described as a financial crisis, tightly connected to the USA real estate bubble. Many stressed upon the fact that all the responsibilities for the crisis lied in the shameful behaviours of business world banks (many of which went bankrupt or were rescued by the Governments of their countries), but also in the swindles driven by great financial operators, such as Bernard Madoff, or the creation of rubbish financial products.

But if we use the tools of Marxist analysis, we must say that such phenomena represent just the effects of an overproduction crisis. The TRPF, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall in the material production of consumption goods, especially cars, obliged Capital to look for other sectors in order to get higher profit margins. The choice of financial speculation, on the one hand, and real estate, on the other, have concurred to the creation of a speculative bubble, that inevitably exploded, with disastrous effects.

Finance, then, is not the disease of capitalism: it’s the drug that could hide the symptoms of the disease. The real disease is the crisis of overproduction. For the past 10 years, the Federal Reserve has just been the pusher, drugging world economy through a monetary policy of expansion, that favoured the new economy bubble, in 1999/2000, and that was used to exit the 2001 crisis. Then, this created the real estate bubble. All this was possible because the Dollar is used as international reserve currency and for the purchase of oil.

But such a predominance, today is unjustified. The USA have the highest public debt in the world, in absolute terms: their commercial scale is decreasing since 1976 and their families’ private debt is enormous. A country with such a debt can defend its positions only with a policy of war and imperialist aggression. The Dollar doesn’t collapse, though, even because it’s kept up by the massive purchase of USA Government Securities by China, which has more than 2.000 billion $ in the State’s cash.

A devaluation of Dollar is definitely something Chinese don’t wish: it’d be convenient for them to get rid of the USA Securities. But they can’t, not brutally, at least. If they were sold, the value of Dollar would be extremely diminished. It is just at the aim of keeping the Dollar steady that Chinese go on in buying American debt.

Chinese want to free themselves from such a trap, as they’re aware that the Dollar is on its way towards the sunset.

China is working at a new global monetary pact, able to limit the extra-power of the Dollar, involving Russia, Japan, France and some Arab countries, in order to replace the Dollar as exchange currency for oil, with a currency basket including Euro and Yuan.

We can definitely state that we are in a delicate transitional phase of restructuration of global Capitalism. A process of reduction of the role of the Dollar, and consequently of the USA. Bush reacted against such a decline with an imperialist policy of pre-emptive wars, failing the target, though. We are aware that the USA will go on in defending themselves by using all the tools of imperialism. Hypothesis of a new expansion of capitalist authoritarianism, in fact, are already visible from Latin America, the (sub)continent that accomplished the greatest efforts to build up a process of emancipation from imperialism and of triumph over neo-liberalism.

The coup in Honduras, the proliferation of the USA basis in Southern America clearly show that the USA don’t mean to move steps backward, on the contrary they mean to re-gain ground in what they’ve always considered as their courtyard.

That’s why we should strongly re-affirm our internationalist solidarity with Latin-American people, beginning with Cuba’s commander-in-chief, Fidel Castro, with Chavez’s Venezuela, Evo Morales’s Bolivia and Lula’s Brazil.

The first task of the communists and workers’ international movement, today, is putting the real causes of the crisis into evidence: the structural incapability of capitalism in contrasting efficiently the cyclic crisis of overproduction. In this phase, communists are the only ones who can point at the responsibilities of Capitalism and its structural contradictions.

Communists are the only ones who can re-affirm what they’ve always stated about the neo-liberalist Unique Thought: they always warned that it would have soon taken the world on the edge of chasm.

Today, we’d have the ideological, political and cultural tools to lead a new battle of ideas against capitalism and its dominant ideology. But we cannot forget, as history teaches us, that it’s always possible to exit the crisis to the right, rather than to the left. Several Governments in the world, Obama’s above all, are simply using the old capitalist strategy, with privatisations of utils when economy is in expansion and with socializations of losses during the phases of crisis. As usual, workers have to pay for saving Capitalism. This happened even after 1929 crisis: Roosvelt, with the New Deal, used the State to save American Capitalism, while Hitler used the State to consolidate the Nazi regime. 1929 crisis produced authoritarian and fascist regimes in Europe rather than the expansion of Socialism and the October Russian Revolution.

We have to be ready, today, as a new capitalist and imperialist attack is likely to be arriving. Only a renovated process of internationalism of the communist and progressive forces can provide us with a common analysis and a strategy of struggle, adequate to the phase that we’re living. In such a phase, then, the political process that we launched with SOLIDNET, becomes a crucial strategic element for those who fight, like we do, for transforming society, for a transition towards socialism, for the emancipation of workers and for the defeat of imperialism.