WAR, CRISIS, AND ANARCHY

From La Nemesi, machine translated

The past financial week (March 12-19) was dominated by fears for the international banking system: first came the bankruptcy of the Silicon Valley Bank, the Californian bank specializing in supporting start-ups and the silicone economy of new technologies; the avalanche of the First Republic Bank, the fourteenth most important bank in the United States, has begun, of which an attempt is being made to rescue in these hours with a "benefit" of 30 billion dollars made available by a solidarity collection of 11 banks North Americans, which however the markets seem not to believe if still last Friday (Friday the 17th, and it is not just a matter of heptacaidekaphobia) the stock lost a further 29% on that day alone; in the midst of the collapse of Credit Suisse, the second Swiss bank, currently kept afloat by the Swiss central bank and waiting to understand if it will fail or if it will be "saved" by its rival UBS, which could absorb it to free itself permanently from the competitor.

If the newspapers scream, the viewers yawn, what is completely missing, but we are used to it, is a general vision that goes beyond the fact of the day and sees a little deeper. It seems that practically no one has related these facts to the war, yet on closer inspection the link is quite close. Indeed, we can say that we are witnessing the first internal repercussions of Western economies, which are paying the bill for the clash between NATO and Russia in Ukraine with a sharp increase in raw materials and the consequent monetary tightening. These are therefore facts that need to be studied in depth for those who, like anarchists and internationalists, make the defeat of their country the key to revolutionary intervention.

War, speculation, prices

The Western economy has never recovered from the 2008 crisis, even if its manifestation has been hidden over the years, not without revolutions and revolts, by a very expansive monetary policy. Put simply, the Fed and the ECB, the US and European central banks, printed a large amount of money and distributed it to the rich, speculators, financiers to play the stock market and virtually keep the markets afloat. The mechanism, said in less vulgar terms, is the classic one of the "cost of money". Central banks that issue money lend money to private banks and attempt to govern finance on the basis of interest rates: by lowering them, when they want to encourage the demand for money to fuel financial speculation, by raising them, when they want to discourage the circulation of money,

For almost fifteen years, interest rates were close to 0%, a boon for speculators, who could buy free money from institutional producers and make investments, speculations, loans. This huge monetary production logically had to produce very high inflation, why didn't this happen? Because the crisis was so serious, the overproduction of goods so large in the countries of mature Western capitalism, that prices remained low in any case. The world of commerce, in order to sell, for many years was willing to sell off, canceling the effect of the monetary injection. Indeed, in some periods, we have experienced moments of real deflation.

A disturbing symptom for capitalism which, however, has not been able to cure the disease. On the contrary, it knew how to do business even in disaster: the money that was printed was gobbled up at the top, without even paying the inflationary price, exponentially fueling the financial metaverse (the classic story of the poor getting poorer and the rich getting richer). Capitalism in the last fifteen years has behaved like a patient with a particular brain tumor that gives incredible well-being with its aggravation.

The Covid-19 crisis has made things even worse and has once again been governed by aggravating the disease: on the one hand, an unprecedented emission of money to revive the economy (the next generation eu), on the other an authoritarian control over consumption (lockdown, supermarket aisles closed) to literally keep the poor at home.

Sooner or later the free ride had to end for lorsigni too. With the so-called restart, inflation suddenly exploded: the sudden demand for materials created the classic funnel. In the meantime, the knots of the digital economy and new technologies have come to a head: this is the case of the so-called chip crisis, generated by a global shortage of the materials necessary for the digitization of the planet and by the Chinese (and partly Russian) monopoly of Rare lands. The crisis affects not only digital, but affects many materials; for example, there is a great shortage of cables, which is stopping some road construction sites, such as tunnels, which require several kilometers of cables for lighting.

AND however, it was the war that brought the thermometer of inflation to paroxysm. On the one hand, Russia has used its energy wealth as a weapon of war against the Western countries that support Ukraine, on the other the own goal of the sanctions, which has isolated Western capital from the emerging powers (the BRICS, the Iran, Saudi Arabia, all "pro-Putin" for different reasons, even renouncing decades-long enmities) also holders of large fossil reserves. More generally, there is a speculative dynamic that concerns every war: the request for materials to produce weapons, trivially, reduces the overall availability of those same materials and raises prices; the reduction of production dedicated to goods used by civilians makes those same goods more expensive; the destruction of factories and fields, think of the food crisis generated by the blockade of Ukrainian wheat, they end up starving even distant regions of the world. In particular as regards Europe, with the war, contact with its natural supplier of raw materials, Russia, with which there is a geographical continuity, has been lost, imposing very expensive purchases of gas on the other side of the world to be transported by sea, the construction of regasification terminals, new contradictions and environmental disputes.

The reaction of the capital-state: intensification of exploitation and monetary retreat

With the monetary lever gone, the workers with home health care, swabs, vaccines and masks, controlled and divided with the green pass, the capitalists faced that moment in the most classic of traditions. By intensifying exploitation. The post-Covid restart was played with beatings, the murderers of trade unionists, the theorems of the judiciary that accuse those who ask for a wage increase of "extortion" against the bosses. If raw materials increase, the bosses try to save at least on human flesh materials. The six deaths a day at work in Italy tell us about this.

A preventive class war (that is, in the absence of a strong conflict from below) and particularly ruthless. From the aforementioned attacks and investigations against conflicting trade unionism, passing through students held under house arrest for almost a year for having contested Confindustria against the school-work alternation. An internal war against social antagonism has superimposed on the world war being fought in Ukraine: if prices rise because of the war, try to contain at least the component of wage costs on goods. Everyone must contribute, even students with their share of free work (and injuries).

The maximum firepower of this internal preventive war was concentrated on the anarchist movement: from the 28 years of Juan Sorroche to the political massacre to which Alfredo Cospito and Anna Beniamino were sentenced with the concrete risk of life imprisonment against the two comrades, up to 41 bis against Alfredo himself.

This attack, as far as Italy is concerned, was inaugurated by the previous government of Mario Draghi. It is under the cloak of National Unity and under the sign of the wise guidance of the man whom the president of Confindustria Bonomi came to define as "the man of necessity", that Italy arms itself for war, that redundancies are unblocked, that the police and judicial reaction is unleashed. The same repressive events inherent in anarchism all take place in those cursed months of National Unity. It is a fact to keep in mind and which part of the solidarity antagonism tries to overlook, focusing attention only against the current "fascist" government and risking acquitting the real instigators of this liberticidal turnaround.

An ideologue of this economic policy, in the shadows, at least as far as the general public is concerned, the governor of the Bank of Italy is running for office. Ignazio Visco never misses an opportunity to reiterate his formula: "avoid a piece-wage dynamic". According to the poor banker, the increase in prices must not correspond to an increase in wages. Of course, otherwise where is the catch?

In addition to the good old policy of repression and exploitation, the answer to the increase in prices generated by the war has been given in the field of finance by a sharp U-turn in monetary policies. Central Banks are a completely peculiar organism, in some ways the real point of fusion between State and Capital: they are institutions of capitalism and at the same time organs of real government, so much so that they have the power granted by the States to print – they and only them – the currency we use every day.

Let's go back to what was explained above: when central banks keep interest rates low, financiers have an incentive to buy the printed money for investment and speculation, so more money is printed, so inflation rises. After fifteen years of such policies, today major Western central banks have quickly and ferociously raised interest rates. The declared objective is to discourage the circulation of money to stop inflation: the result is to make mortgages cost much more, thus creating a new mass of junk loans that are not honored, giving less money to speculators to play on the stock market.

In other words, capitalism, instead of addressing the structural reasons for inflation, i.e. above all ending the war in Ukraine, renouncing sanctions on Russia, bartering political concessions with Putin in exchange for cheap methane, etc., not being able to do this for reasons of military policy, the only thing he knows how to do (besides picking on the exploited and preventively raising the level of repression) is the financial acrobatics circulating such as the reduction of money.

Hence the crisis of these days and what could be even greater at the gates of tomorrow: some credit institutions that have performed for years thanks to the doping of easy and cheap money, today are no longer able to carry out the same operations and go bankrupt . AND exactly the case of the Silicon Valley Bank: for years the Californian bank took the "fresh off the press" dollars from the American central bank at a very low interest rate and could in turn lend them to the entrepreneurs of the new digital economy at medium-low rates while doing always profits. Now that the cost of dollars has skyrocketed with central bank rate hikes, speculators like the SVB are forced to offer them at even higher rates to businesses. If we add to this the fact that the whole world of the digital economy is a huge mountain of hot air, if we add the difficulties that these new technological companies are encountering with the chip crisis, etc., then the Silicon Valley Bank does not can no longer do business as before by lending money to start-ups,

So here is a line, not too tortuous, that unites war with the financial crisis of these days: war produces price increases, central banks respond on a wholly virtual terrain such as the reduction of the currency in circulation, finally finance, deprived of the doping that began in 2008 of strong monetary injection, she goes into withdrawal symptoms.

Let them pay: for a radical defeatist initiative

These scoundrels who exploit us, who drag us into war, who starve us with rising prices, who arrest us and who kill our comrades have to pay a far greater cost than that of their shares on the stock exchange. They have to pay a social cost for their crimes.

The internationalist perspective that has moved us since the beginning of the conflict in Ukraine is that of fighting primarily against one's own bloc of military powers. We have no sympathy for the Russian autocrat, as is the temptation for the communist and red-brown world, nor for the blockade of the so-called Western democracies, as happens to a large part of the new left in disaster. However, what a revolutionary can do in a context of war is to fight for the defeat of his own government, to open up revolutionary possibilities. We sympathize with our Russian comrades who attack and sabotage the military infrastructure of Putin, but the best way to be worthy of their courage is certainly not to attack the Russians from the west ourselves (which would mean putting on the NATO helmet on our heads),

The financial avalanche of these days represents the first visible repercussion of the war on the health of "our" economies. It is important to know how to listen to these creaks, still modest without a doubt, and to intervene to aggravate the situation.

In this first year of the war, an authentically internationalist, i.e. defeatist, perspective has struggled to emerge. Our own initiatives in this sense have failed to take the form of a real attack and propaganda actually aimed at the great mass of the exploited and at cannon fodder as a whole. They were initiatives that at most made internal propaganda for the movement. Probably things could not have gone differently from this, if one thinks of the level of theoretical and practical backwardness on these issues, if one thinks of the rampant stonedness in the movement (from the pro-Putin communists to the German antifas who mend the stockings of the Azov battalion).

Except for a handful of Italian-language articles and interventions, an uncompromising, or at least decent, internationalist position could only be observed in the positions taken by a few groups from the United States, Spain, the Czech Republic and very little else. In any case it is mostly a battle of the pen, however confined to an internal reflection and controversy. Meanwhile at the front the cannon fights the battles and the truncheon fights them on the home front.

The anarchist movement has given a great proof of internationalism of the heart in the mobilization in support of the hunger strike of Alfredo Cospito and against the Italian prison regime of annihilation of the 41 bis. It is therefore important to indicate even more clearly how the attack against anarchists in Italy is an act of war that takes place in a context of deployed warfare, for the first time after 70 years of symmetrical warfare - tank against tank - between infamous imperialist powers. One way therefore to make them pay, to raise the cost of the crime they are committing against the body of our comrade, is to use our energies to feed their contradictions in the best possible way, to embarrass the Italian government in front of their allies.

emmeffe
March 19, 2023

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