By PEDRO DE ALCANTARA FIGUEIRA*
What we have in this period of more than a century is a process of revolutionary transformations of a new type accompanied by a fierce counter-revolution
Let us not make facts a barrier that prevents us from getting to the root of current reality. What matters, above all, when we are faced with an explosive reality like the one we are facing now is to seek to know the origin of the facts and their deeper causes, which will enable us to understand that this is a situation that results from the development of a certain issue. This is a condition for us to intervene in your solution.
Therefore, starting from this question, this is what reality forces us to do. 1914 can be considered the starting point of a new world in which capitalist productive forces confirm Marx's analysis according to which capital entered a phase destructive of its own forces. The term contradiction, repeatedly used in The capital, summarizes the content of this trajectory of revolutionary force that becomes its opposite, that is, a counter-revolutionary force. The first world war had its reasons.
Since then, from a mode of production that revolutionized the world, its trajectory has substantially reversed, having become a “mode of destruction”. For this special reason, we can say that since then the world has been experiencing upheavals that ultimately result in the acceleration of a process of social transformation.
I ask for special attention to what we call the mode of destruction, in clear opposition to the mode of production, which, since the times of bourgeois economic science, political economy, has been consecrated as the expression befitting a revolutionary era.
We do not need to remember here what the two world wars meant in terms of devastation in Europe. Since then, that is, from 1914 to the present day, we have had something similar to the wars that dominated the XNUMXth century, when absurdities such as the Thirty Years' War and the Hundred Years' War consumed entire populations.
At the current stage, capital has become autophagic and the amount that remains committed to productive activities can be said to have become incapable of reproducing the society that corresponded to it. From its rubble what remained, in social and political terms, was something undefined whose more appropriate name would be “horde”.
What we have in this period of more than a century is a process of revolutionary transformations of a new type accompanied by a fierce counter-revolution. This confrontation, as it is exactly at this point where we find ourselves, explains the totality of political demonstrations around the world. Both the confrontation between Russia and Ukraine, or rather, between Russia and NATO, and the holocaust that Israel has been systematically carrying out for decades in Palestinian lands, fit perfectly in this revolution–counterrevolution context.
Irresistible and irreversible transformations are at the heart of all questions.
It is not surprising that, in response to this revolutionary storm, the American empire, architect of the counter-revolution, engages in the most criminal actions across our globe. It differs little from what all empires did in their dying phase.
This moment of crisis that affects much of the world takes on a very special dimension in that country that was once a capitalist superpower. Her downward trajectory has led her to try solutions that worsen her situation rather than recover from an end that announces itself with every step she takes. The result – which is inherent to its capitalist nature – is the resort to violence that tries to justify itself by resorting to anti-communism. A failed resource, therefore, just like the irresistible tendency towards capital domination in the XNUMXth century, now the irresistible tendencies are going in a new direction, precisely those that point to the end of antagonisms based on social classes.
In a 1964 letter to writer Coretta Scott, Luther King, among rich considerations about socialism and capitalism, expressed himself as follows: “Capitalism has passed its expiration date”.
* Pedro de Alcantara Figueira he holds a doctorate in history from Unesp. Author, among other books, of History essays (UFMS).
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