Camaradas all over the world. This conference led us to the strategic historical experiences, memories and spirit of revolutionary socialist of Zimmerwald. It is such an honor to us, to share this historical moment with you, and stand along with all of you in facing our dangerous and cynical moments. And here, we have representatives of East Timor social left movements, along with Komite Esperansa from East Timor, are Klibur Estudante Progresivo(KEP), Movimento Resistencia Social (MRS), Juventude Socialista Maubere(JSM), Movimento Rosas Mean(MRM), Rehabilitasaun Ekolojia Nasional(RENAL), Ermera Peasants Union(UNAER), Manufahi Peasants Union and so on. And again, it is our privilege to speak on this historical day. 11 September, marking the 200 days of US/NATO war against Russia and its preparation for war against China. On the other, today also marked a decades of 9/11 or September Attacks, a terrorist attack that means to us oppositely – that is for us, the attack resulted by the diseases of fundamentalism that was created by the virus of Western liberalism and imperialism.
We are living in a time of “historical chaos” that follows in parallel with the “obscurantist reaction and restoration”. Before I move into the current Ukraine war. I would like to talk and discuss the central neglected questions on the historical development of our time: that is impasse. That is a name that is responsible for and the reflection of the structural crisis of international communist, for its absence in the current crisis and war. For us, our problem for decades has been not only a crisis but also an impasse. It was a situation characterized our ‘tipsy-world’ today, and in which any march-forwardness always led to march backwardness, and of course, to nowhere to move.
To cite my other articles is:
The impasse is a determinable point of our historical time […] We found impasse, not a simple name or politico-grammatical expression, nor is it simply equivalent to economist word such as stagnation. It is not only a transition, regression, finalism of particular conjuncture or epiphenomena of crisis – not an excrescence monstrosity, not either the negation or any shift in the representation, but the existential normality in between the absence of emancipatory politics and the globalized imperialist capitalism as such.
Therefore, the contemporary conjuncture of global capitalism shows the over-expanding crisis produced under the impassable crisis of the system as a whole, to the entire capitalist modernity. The crisis persists in its long downturn and decline because it is maintained through the prolonged crisis of impasse. Isn't all current regression and absence of emancipatory politics, prolonged downturn and stagnation of global capitalism reflecting the deepening, and expansion of both entangled crisis and impasse in the normal function of capitalism as an impassable system and crisis prone contradictory system?
We today witnessed the merging of two structural fields that permits a deep impasse of a crisis, and a crisis of impasse. The current situations imply the need to move beyond the dominant univocal understanding of the disorder. The impasse now became the dominant axiomatic name of contemporary conjuncture, perhaps an uncanny real that we must accept and to move beyond. The combined distinction with crisis conditioned the unity between both, reconstituted toward a new substance of the system and current representation. According to necessity of understanding this combined disorder-obscured substance and representation that forced us to rethink and rediscover the contemporary conjuncture to foment a new social imagination and experimentation of collective politics and dialectical coordination between North-South, to rethink the struggle and capacities to mobilize the balance of forces on the international level that will lead us to transcend the global neoliberal financial capitalism, and move toward a world socialism.
Comrades, the war in Ukraine has its dual character. A national fascist counter-revolutionary and imperialist war for profits against Russia, then to China. A fascist war that is reactive against the crisis, the people, the left, the Russia, and the preservation of the decadent system. While in another, an imperialist war of conquest of wealth, for the sake of accumulation, of profits, and of course, to empire-building.
Ukraine neoliberal fascism is the ‘frightful enemy’ of the people, of the working masses, either in Ukraine, in Russia, in Europe, in the US, in the Global South, international left and so on. War and fascism in Ukraine are not simply the extension, means of bourgeoisie or monopoly capital’s violence against the working masses. Both are the essence and expression of decay and disintegrated capitalism, deep contradiction unfolding in our global imperialist capitalism – and fascism, a reactionary force that is reactive toward a decadence system and disintegrating society. Its political and ideological functions were to restore and protect the regime of profit, to safeguard the private property regime amidst the growing decadence and crisis.
Here it leads to important, and provocative questions over the national question of Ukraine. Ones that our sectarian and puritan left have failed to see, instead they committed to play the imperialist, NATO’s grand narrative of propaganda. First is, are they (Ukrainian state, or government) neutral?, our answer is big No! – for us the left, and the left in Ukraine or elsewhere, our tasks is to expose the bourgeoisie, dependent, parasitic, predatory character of the Ukraine Government, its fascistic elements. Ukraine nationals had completely filled the three triangulation character of twenty first century fascism: it has a neoliberal reactionary power in state; it has fascist forces in the civil society and it has the fascist monopolies behind of it. Secondly, did the Ukrainian state and US/NATO fight for Ukrainian freedom? – Again, our answer is a big No! – Here again, US/NATO fight for the liberation of the Russian wealth and resources to be able to privatize as what Ukrainian government has done to IMF, World Bank and US/imperialist triad – it ensures the natural and human resources to be able to be controlled by the North. It was a war that replaced Ukraine blood with the profits to the imperialist triad.
For us, it was an imperialist war of geopolitical expansion to weaken and designed for regime changes across the counter-hegemonic countries of Russia/China and movements of the East and South, a war to rebuild US global hegemony and nuclear supremacy. And, it’s just another war-preparation to counter the revolutionary war against China’s industrial market socialism, which is this decades-exceptional achievement resulting from the Chinese’s state and party political system known as Democratic Centralism. The imperialist global war and militarism is a war that financed by us in the South, by the working masses in the advanced capitalist nations, by the crucifixion of the vast masses of global population.
I would like to propose some “optimistic” of the will here. I begin with the question, what is the progressive and non-progressive character of war in Ukraine?
The non-progressive part of the war is that it aims at accumulation at world scale, how the militarism abroad was central to imperial global strategy of accumulation and hegemony, and war as a means of preserving the stability of the system – that is unipolar super-imperialism of US-led globalized neoliberal imperialist order. Consequently it brings more suffering to the working people and Global South countries, that is more pillaging, more austerity, more debt, and more transfer of wealth from South to North.
The progressive part of the crisis and war initiated by the fascist-imperialist aggression for our particular task in the twenty-first century is that, this diseases not only struck us, it not simply bring more deaths and suffering, but it helps dissolve the capitalist schizophrenia-inducing social confusion and impasse. It is with this that, the idea of happy-ending after the collapse of socialism and the spread of liberal capitalist modernity was a real childish utopia of the Fukuyamaian ideology, where they claimed rationality and peace will have to reign in the society of late capitalism. What some has referred to ‘super-calamity’, where the aggressive social inequality, misery and pauperization coupled with worldwide ecological crisis, pandemic and potential nuclear war is not just a bleak vision in the coming future – it is the idea and reality of “permanent holocaust” that approaching us rather than the so called ‘a period of return to normality’, as our beloved liberal, democrats and right-wingers has promised the masses.
The imperialist US/NATO proxy war on Russia and China over Ukraine, and now Taiwan, is a traditional form of ‘unjust war’. The unjust war is a non-progressive war. What is unjust war, shall be responded with just war by the peace-loving countries. I think that's what Russia is doing and what China has to do. While in addition, the fascist war backed by the imperialist North is a war to maintain what be described as war to protect the ‘evolution by/within continuity’ – an irrational move and actions to safeguard the continuity of impasse, of decadent, of moribund, of barbarism. As Marxists and communists in movements, our solidarity shall be with all independent liberation movements and oppressed nations, and it shall be equal to existing peace-loving countries that are facing imperialist aggression and war for profits.
To end, Marxism is a proletarian science, it is a science of the partisan, to take side, and look, work and struggle from the side of the unseen, of the oppressed and exploited class/people. So do the question of war – A war always provoked and initiated by the ruling, established power, by the monopoly, by the capitalist states of the North. The objective reality since the rise of the era of capitalism is maintained along this objective law. The imperialist war is an unjust war that should be totally opposed by the people, and any social-political left. The Russian position is clear, it is to defend the Russian sovereignty and its people, to defend the oppressed people in Ukraine, of defensive war countering the cruel expansionist war for profits and fascist war of preserving the stability of the profit regime.
To move backward briefly, the European empires were ruled by the fascist forces prior to World War II and the Cold War across the Western Europe. And the organic crisis of capitalism during the 1930s-1940s, and 1960s-1970s, opened the revolutionary revolt against the empire from the Global South. The current organic crisis of global capitalism, specially in the West, again, will test this historical hypothesis on the return of popular revolt in many parts of the Global South against the tyranny return of neo-fascist forces across the civil society, the reactionary far-right in political power of the state, and the hegemony of monopoly capital (with its transnational, corporate and financialized variant). Again, from the First and Second World War until the Cold War has given us revolution and war across the world during the Twenty Century – and we are not afraid of the possible consequences of war that will open a new horizon for more chaos, for national and international socialist revolution.
That's why Mao Zedong said: first, we are against it; second, we are not afraid of it. Comrades, we don’t want a war – it is a imperialist-fascist war that was imposed on us, that forced the nation and people to take arms, and to fight.
Down with war!
Down with Imperialism!
A luta continua!
Speech delivered at the conference of Stop the War of US/NATO Imperialism Against Russia! Stop US Preparations of War Against China!, September 11 2022.
Fernando A. T. Ximenes, is a member of Komite Esperansa, East Timor, Southeast Asia
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