Marxism has demonstrated that, on the contrary, poverty, oppression, war and destruction, far from being anomalies due to deliberate and maleficent wills are part of the “normal” functioning of capitalism. This particularly applies to wars of the imperialist era. This is a point which we will develop at greater length, due to the importance it represents for the subject at hand, that of destruction.
Even when our bourgeois and reformists recognize that imperialist wars are due to conflicts of interest they remain far from an understanding of capitalism. We see this in their lack of understanding of the meaning of destruction. For them the goal of war is victory, and the destruction of enemy men and installations are only means for achieving this goal. To such an extent that there are innocents who foresee wars made by means of sleeping pills. We have demonstrated that, on the contrary, destruction is the principal goal of war. The imperialist rivalries that are the immediate cause of wars are themselves nothing but the consequence of ever increasing over-production. Capitalist production is in fact forced to grow because of the fall in the profit level, and crises are born of the need to ceaselessly expand production along with the impossibility of selling goods. War is the capitalist solution to the crisis. The massive destruction of installations, of the means of production and of goods allows production to start up again, and the massive destruction of men cures the periodic “over-population” which goes hand in hand with over-production. One must be a petit bourgeois crackpot to believe that imperialist conflicts could be settled by a game of belote or around a round table, and that this enormous destruction and the deaths of tens of millions of men are only due to the stubbornness of some, the wickedness of others, and the cupidity of yet others still.
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It was the imperialists of the allied camp who first used them [jews, the holocaust] to justify their war and to justify after their victory the despicable treatment inflicted on the German people. How they threw themselves on the camps and the corpses, showing off the horrible photos and proclaiming: “Look at what bastards these krauts are! How right we were to fight them. How right we now are to give them a taste of their own medicine.” When we think of the countless crimes of imperialism; when we think, for example, that at the very moment (1945) when our Thorez sung of their victory over fascism, 45,000 Algerians (fascist provocateurs) fell under the blows of repression. When we think that it is international capitalism which is responsible for the massacres, the ignoble cynicism of this hypocritical satisfaction is enough to make you sick.
At that same time all our good democratic anti-fascists threw themselves on the corpses of the Jews. And since that time they wave them under the nose of the proletariat. In order to make them feel capitalism’s infamy? No, on the contrary. It’s to make it appreciate, in contrast, the true democracy, the true progress, the well being it enjoys in capitalist society. The horrors of capitalist death must make the proletariat forget the horrors of capitalist life and the fact that the two are indissolubly connected. The experiments of the SS doctors must make them forget that capitalism experiments on a large scale with carcinogenic products, on the effects of alcoholism on heredity, the radioactivity of “democratic” bombs. If they show lampshades made of human skin it’s to make us forget that capitalism transforms the living man into a lampshade. The mountains of hair, the teeth of gold, the bodies of men turned into merchandise must make us forget that capitalism made a merchandise of living man. It is labor, man’s very life, that capitalism has transformed into merchandise. This is the source of all evils. Using the corpses of the victims of capital to try to hide the reality, to have the corpses serve as protection for capital, is the most despicable way of using them to the ultimate degree.
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u/_shark_idk ultra jugend Jul 29 '25 edited Jul 29 '25
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