Franz J.T. Lee, February, 2009

Karl Marx: "The crowing of the Gallic cock in Paris will once again wake up Europe”

In a previous article here, I wrote: "Progressively, as it is nearing its universal, finite end, our world order, our mode of production inexorably is converting itself into a mode of self-destruction."

We indicated how world imperialism was destroying capital, labor forces, infrastructures and wealth in a desperate attempt to overcome a cataclysmic situation, to rescue itself. To crown it all, in the 'Telegraph' Edmund Conway in Davos reported that during the past five quarters, the global crisis has already destroyed "40% of the world's wealth ... and business leaders expect the global economic crisis can only get worse."

What does it mean to 'destroy 40% of the world's wealth'?

It means, that after the physical and intellectual exploitation and destruction of thousand millions of workers, now also that what they produced, ... the goods, foodstuffs, wares, arms, use values, exchange values, capital and profits ... all are being destroyed, not because of scarcity or want, but because of structural, systemic contradictions, of mega-overproduction, are converted into wastage, into nothing, while millions and millions die of hunger, poverty sicknesses and misery.

Hence, contrary to the myopic great expectations of some participants of the World Economic Forum that "the crisis will endure for some time," I warned that 'for some time' could result for everybody in the following existential dilemma: "Imperialism can't offer any lasting solution to the global crisis without annihilating itself."

This even News Corp chief executive Rupert Murdoch is beginning to note, that "the atmosphere was worsening -- despite global economic confidence plumbing the lowest depths on record."

Although the economic experts warned that "another crisis at some point in the future was inevitable," they did not study Marxist political economy and Hegelian dialectical objective idealist philosophy, else they would have known that capitalist corporate imperialism is neither infinite, nor absolute; like anything else on this globe, eventually space and time will also devour it, as such, its horror and terror will and can not last forever.

Let us take a quick politico-economic stroll down scientific, socialist memory lane.

The last Great Depression of 1929, including its concomitant collateral destruction lasted till 1945, and it spilled over into global colonial wars, genocide and massacres till this very day. This global recession and depression is gigantic: it is like comparing the mole-hill of yesteryear with Mount Everest of today. It is called globalization, it is capitalism globalized, it is here to stay globally, yes, to die globally.

This is no secret; over the last two centuries. many a serious scholar, non-Marxist or socialist, Simon Bolivar or Ernest Mandel, Fidel Castro or Frantz Fanon, Rosa Luxemburg or Clara Zetkin, all of them warned about this coming structural, endemic and epidemic global terror. The capitalist economic laws of development ... as described in Marx's 'Capital' and other socialist writings, ... competition, monopolization or concentration, at the level of globalization, super technology and extra profits logically were leading towards this current chaotic and anarchic maelstrom. They also explained transhistorically why and how this capitalist system will inexorably perish.
 

In our blog, on December 30, 2007 I explained why in 2008, a direct military invasion of Venezuela by the USA would be impossible, would be suicide, "because it could spark off that what Marx and Engels already in 1848 have predicted in their "Manifesto of the Communist Party": Globalized Chaos and Anarchy."
(See: http://www.franzlee.org/blog4/emancipation  )
Furthermore, with reference to globalization, I quoted what the founding fathers of scientific and philosophic socialism were saying and predicting:

"A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells."
See:
http://www.franzlee.org/blog4/emancipation/ )

More than ever the following is still valid in the epoch of globalization:

"For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule. "  (Ibid.)

This is what happened in Greece the other day, and in France a few days ado.

All this the great corporate moguls, their think tanks, the Bilderberg Group, the Club of Rome, NASA, the Pentagon and NATO all know for sure, much more profound than we could ever imagine. Whom the Murdoch Empire does not inform about the real and true apocalyptic state of affairs are precisely those who still have a possible solution in their hands, not pathological consumerism, not mesmerized brains, not Gandhist pacifism, but Fanonian self-defense, but workers' class consciousness and struggles; not Orwellian global fascism (sold as democracy), not Stalinism (ideologically equated with scientific socialism), not conservatism and reform, but Permanent Global Revolution against Perpetual Global Terrorism. The opposite of imperialist violence is not world peace, it is Global, Human Emancipation.

When and where ever across the previous millennia, all along the brutal global accumulation of capital, any 'coolie', 'Kaffir', slave, peasant, serf, worker or house-wife really enjoyed 'world peace'?

In a recent article I also suggested that as toiling pack-animals we should go on global strike,  go home for a month, go and play with our kids, make love and no Gaza, then we would see our reality, then we would not need Marxist literature anymore, then it will become clear that the whole globalization is an endless transatlantic slave trade, a Triangle of Bermuda World Market, for millions; yes, a daily My Lai, Sharpeville, a  'Caracaso', Fallujah and Gaza.

And yet, without the class conscious struggles of these these 'wretched of the earth', of these billions of toiling slaves, the species ma, humanity, has no future in our galaxy. These 'miserables' (Hugo), these 'speaking tools' (Aristotle),  form the infinitesimal possibility of global emancipation. Two million French workers already made an excellent start; they are setting the emancipatory paradigm for our last opportunity of self-liberation.

In the early morning hours, in Gaza, defying the Israeli reconnaissance planes, with militant optimism the Palestinian cock was crowing Victory. Could it be that Marx will accomplish another scientific prediction? In 1848, he said: "The crowing of the Gallic cock in Paris will once again wake up Europe.”

Is this what is taking on proletarian contours currently in Paris?