A revolutionary analysis of the international exploited class for the
year 2025. By REGLIB ---- In these first days of the year we wonder ifwe are currently experiencing the agony of imperialism, as the anarchist
militant Abraham Guillén already claimed in the middle of the 20th
century, and that this world imperialist power always generates the
fiction of being in continuous agony due to its increasingly deeper
crises and shorter cycles. We often wonder if this slow agony is true,
or if it derives from incorrect analyses of our ranks and intelligent
successes of this capitalist power to continue surviving. The key is to
find the indicators that lead us to develop a convenient theory of
social reproduction for our revolutionary purposes. We can see in the
last decade an increase in crises and wars with increasingly pressing
and widespread conflicts; And it would be consistent to think that
revolutions come later, but these do not arise spontaneously: they must
be strengthened and carefully organized. Establishing ourselves as
anarchist revolutionary organizations implies theoretical and practical
commitments that go beyond us as mere individuals and even as a
collective, because the destiny of humanity must be determined by what
the exploited class wants for itself from that emancipation.
Beginning this year 2025 we wanted to review the past year on the
international situation through various conflicts that have erupted,
intensified, or become entrenched; and that are part of a whole: the
strategies in a multipolar imperialism. A world in which the US still
recognizes itself as the great world power that still imposes its
hegemony, although having to share pieces of the cake, but they will
undoubtedly die killing if control of the current world were to get out
of hand. War conflicts of various kinds (military, technological,
economic, or cultural) have caused movements in the chessboard pieces of
multipolar geostrategy. We are living in the midst of daily conflict at
many levels, not only the violence of capitalism on our daily lives in
the Global North; but also the material, human and psychosocial
consequences of the multiple migration crises, wars and looming genocide.
War in Ukraine, conflict encapsulated in European territory.
The current conflict between Ukraine, supported by the NATO bloc, and
Russia, began in 2014-2015 after the events of the Ukrainian Euromaidan
and the independence of Donetsk and Lugansk, which led to a phase of
truce with the Minsk II Agreements, and which was reactivated in 2022
with the military invasion of Donbass and other Ukrainian regions by
Russia. Billions of dollars from the arms industry have been allocated
to Ukraine, a conflict that is also cultural between two models of
imperialism, NATO and Russian; and a war of attrition in which Ukraine
has been defeated time and again on the battlefield. This year, some
strategic Ukrainian cities have fallen under Russian control, and
although Ukrainian troops organized the invasion of the Russian province
of Kursk, Western countries have been pressuring Ukraine to find a
solution that will end this conflict in that part of the world
chessboard. From the beginning, it has been a conflict at the gates of
Europe with serious consequences for migration and industrial and energy
infrastructure. Although the government of Joe Biden, a staunch defender
of the most fundamentalist positions of US imperialism, has been leading
this support for Ukraine for these two years, it now seems that the
scenario left to Donald Trump in this case is that of the role of the
"good cop", that is, to close this conflict by granting a partial
victory to Russia. This situation has led to a global militarisation in
recent years with a greater production of weapons and the imposition of
greater military spending. A conflict that has served in general terms
to normalise a warlike climate among the European population, and to
consolidate the mentality of a latent and continuous state of war.
Crisis, war and genocide of the Palestinian people in the Middle East.
The horrible genocide that Israel is perpetrating in the 21st century
against the Palestinian population is international evidence that no
one, except the pro-Zionist faction of the world, questions today. At
the end of last November, even the International Criminal Court issued
an arrest warrant against Benjamin Netanyahu, president of Israel, and
against Yoav Gallant, former Israeli defence minister. We have seen how
over the last year Israel also invaded southern Lebanon and bombed
Beirut against civilian targets, justifying itself by attacking the
Hezbollah guerrilla. The world also took its breath away when, in
October 2024, for several weeks, there was a threat of a total
escalation of the conflict in the Middle East with the exchange of
ballistic missile attacks between Iran and Israel on their own
territories. At a global level, in the spring of this year, student
movements emerged on university campuses that brought to the forefront
of the media the entire social escalation of international denunciation
since this new phase of the genocide against Palestine intensified in
2023. The defense of Human Rights seems an ineffective strategy in the
21st century to put an end to a genocide in which all Western countries
are directly and indirectly involved with arms sales to Israel and other
economic and political support for its terror structure. The interest in
gas on the coast of Gaza and the reconstruction of the occupied
territory, which Israel has already assured that it will not return, are
two of the main economic drivers and interests that imperialism has
before it right now in Palestine.
However, in recent weeks and while events are still unfolding, we have
seen how on December 8th the regime of Bashar Al-Assad collapsed in
Damascus, after the city of Aleppo in the north had succumbed a week
earlier, following the offensive of the group "Hayat Tahrir al-Sham"
(HTS), the Syrian branch of Al-Qaeda and which at the beginning of the
Syrian War was called the Al-Nusra Front. The pro-Turkish Syrian
National Army (SNA), financed and supported by Turkey in its offensive
against the SDF (Syrian Democratic Forces) made up mainly of Kurdish
self-defense militias, was also involved. On the other hand, Israel
invaded Syria beyond the Golan Heights, on the border established in
1974 after the Yom Kippur War. The fall of the Al-Assad government and
his flight to Moscow has opened a Pandora's box with consequences that
are still unpredictable. All the first and second-rate imperialist
actors are carrying out diplomatic moves, negotiations and exerting
pressure at all political and military levels to reorganise their
alliances and hegemonic positions. In the process, the Syrian civilian
population has been the main victim of this conflict since the last
decade, and the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria,
multi-ethnic but with a Kurdish majority, is being attacked by Turkey in
this Syrian transition process towards an authoritarian Islamist regime.
The autonomy achieved by the Kurdish people in a consciously
anti-capitalist and feminist revolutionary process is being attacked by
this reorganisation of imperialist hegemonies in the Middle East. An
example of how revolutionary autonomy is only defensible with a
programme of political, economic and territorial expansion that is
expressed in international terms to attack the correlation of
reactionary forces.
Conflicts in Africa.
This year, instability has continued in countries such as South Sudan,
where a brutal armed conflict began in 2013 as a result of tensions
arising from an oppressive political system and the struggle for control
of power between national elites. This conflict is not only ethnic, but
a clear manifestation of the violence of global capitalism on
territories where neocolonialism still prevails, which encourages
corruption and class exploitation. Foreign interventions in this
conflict, and the interests of regional powers, have exacerbated the
massacres and perpetuated the dependence of Sudanese social communities.
Hundreds of thousands of people died and millions were displaced until
2020, when an equally authoritarian unity government was established.
Currently, violence from different factions continues, in addition to a
humanitarian crisis of enormous dimensions. Sudanese anarchist comrades
had to leave the country in 2022 and have since lived in exile due to
persecution for their clandestine political activities trying to
establish a revolutionary path in this conflict.
The Tigray War in Ethiopia, which began four years ago, has also become
entrenched in a fictitious truce with multiple actors continuing to
inflict violence on the local population. In November 2020, the
Ethiopian army launched a military operation against the Tigray People's
Liberation Front, after previously declaring an attack by them on a
national military base. This led to the start of a territorial
conflict, in which Eritrea also joined as an actor in the conflict,
occupying part of the territory of Tigray to this day.
This conflict is a reflection of the general situation in the entire
eco-climatic region known as the African Sahel, highlighting the
intervention of the United States, Russia and China, among other actors,
in changes of government, alliances and military coups that have behind
them the interest of the exploitation of natural resources in African
countries by multinationals. Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso have taken
steps forward this year by establishing cooperation and nationalization
of strategic resources, expelling French and American soldiers from the
region and strengthening ties with Russia and Iran. The struggle for
control of these resources involves serious humanitarian crises and
armed conflicts of a second order in the media in current neoliberalism,
and silently bleeds these countries dry by perpetuating a model of
capitalist neocolonialism.
Tensions in East Asia.
Today, in the second decade of the 21st century, no one questions that
China long ago became a world-class state capitalism, and that
competition for influence in Southeast Asia with the United States and
for expanding its control through technological and energy market niches
are the driving force behind all geostrategy in that region. The
protests in Hong Kong and the tensions in Xinjiang reflect a growing
discontent against state repression and economic exploitation. The
situation in Taiwan is particularly complex, since behind the fight for
its right to self-determination with respect to China, there are
interests that seek to reaffirm control of the Asian giant, and, on the
other hand, American intelligence trying to undermine Chinese power.
In South Korea and Japan, capitalism has, since the middle of the last
century, created significant inequalities and a psychopathic work
culture, but there have also been experiences of union movements as a
response to this exploitation and precariousness that seek radical
structural change and the abolition of the neoliberal system. In fact,
in the Korean country, martial law was declared by conservative
President Yoon Suk-yeol at the beginning of last December, but within a
few hours Korean society took to the streets and this attempt to
officially impose military measures to control the country had to be
revoked.
In Bangladesh, student protests broke out in the middle of last year
that would become massive until Sheikh Hasina, the country's prime
minister and known as "the iron lady of Bangladesh", resigned on August
5. The protests began against national legislation that guaranteed a
direct quota for the children of government officials. However, the
harsh repression by the authorities and the dozens of students who were
killed in the protests increased the protests organized throughout the
country with demands for social justice, against corruption and in favor
of greater labor rights. There were attacks in many cities on government
buildings, and solidarity between workers and marginalized communities
in the country was strengthened, generating a wave of anti-imperialist
mobilization.
This fall of President Hasina's regime is not an isolated process in
Southeast Asia, as four years ago in Thailand, a multitude of students
took to the streets raising three fingers as a symbol in reference to
three main demands against the Vajiralongkorn monarchy. Also during
2022, there were mobilizations in Sri Lanka against the Rajapaksa
political dynasty. And finally, the crisis in Myanmar after the military
coup in 2021, which triggered a popular resistance movement that
advocates direct confrontation with the Military Junta that
authoritarianly governs the Burmese country. This guerrilla resistance
movement has been driven by a broad coalition of nationalist, social
democratic, and communist grassroots groups, with a very unequal
correlation of military and territorial forces; however, the struggle in
an Asian country like Myanmar is an example of self-organization of
certain communities against military authoritarianism and local capitalism.
Social and political conflicts in Latin America. The violence of
nation-states against the counter-power represented by gangs and drug
trafficking groups in countries such as El Salvador, Ecuador, Haiti and
Mexico itself are examples of tensions that affect political movements
building popular power in Latin America. Specifically, in countries
like Mexico and Ecuador, this confrontation between national power and
the power of drug trafficking groups represents violence against the
autonomies built by indigenous resistance groups. Although these groups
deserve all our support as anarchists for their anti-capitalist
perspective, they see their territories of self-government increasingly
besieged by not having a broader revolutionary and internationalist
strategy of unity. The migration issue is also used as a tool of
aggression by the United States in Central America, imposing repressive
policies on the various American borders and human trafficking in
collusion with the military, national police and organized crime groups.
In Argentina, a serious social crisis began with the victory of the
ultra-liberal Javier Milei. His ultra-liberal economic policy has meant
an increase in unemployment and poverty among a working class subjected
to constant hardship. His government has launched an offensive against
the public sector through layoffs and cuts. We have seen half of the
Argentine population living below the poverty line while Milei's
pro-private policy concentrates wealth in the hands of his friends: big
business and the financial sector. Milei seeks to destroy the economic
model of his political rival, Peronism, leaving Argentina in private
hands and a population that, under the rhetoric of freedom, is
completely subordinated to the owners. In 2025, it will be necessary to
observe the path that opens between Peronism and ultra-liberalism: the
resistance of the Argentine working class and its construction of
popular power over a population abandoned and subjected to poverty by
the state and the bourgeoisie.
In a key analysis of the situation in Latin American countries where
there are progressive governments such as in Chile with Gabriel Boric,
in Colombia with Gustavo Petro, in Mexico with Clara Sheinbaum or
Yamandú Orsi, president-elect in Uruguay; a portrait of Latin American
social democracies can be established. The widespread rightward shift of
Latin American societies in a process of rooting neoliberal values
through the interference of the United States and the defeat of leftist
processes in the last century have created a docile social democracy.
Although reformist programs never aspire to a revolutionary
emancipation, nor can their political strategies lead to it as a
necessary and desirable horizon, Latin American social movements
promoted the self-organization of the exploited beyond establishing
proposals for autonomy with obvious limitations. In America, however,
the construction of anarchist popular power from below is making
headway, far from those social democratic governments that have further
distanced the possibility of majority revolutionary movements.
Conclusions: political crisis and advance of conservatism.
Given the results of the latest elections in the United States (a
landslide victory for Donald Trump), the European elections (with the
advance of the far right) and the Eastern European countries (with
greater advances by the anti-liberal right), it can be seen that public
opinion is turning towards the hard right.
We can look for several causes for this turn. The first is political:
progressive governments have not managed to guarantee the material
well-being of their populations. Everywhere we see a decline in the
living conditions of the working classes, which distances them from
supporting these political options and sometimes makes them partisans of
the populist right. Another cause is media-related: the control of
social networks and, practically, of almost all of the Internet at this
time, by the click oligarchy is a fact. Characters such as Elon Musk or
Peter Thiel are known for defending far-right positions and with them
the messages in that sense have intensified to inconceivable limits. The
toxicity of the networks has skyrocketed and with it the rise of the
right among the ages that most consume the contents of the networks.
The third cause is geopolitical. In the West there is a feeling of
regression, of permanent crisis, that we are under bad governments that
nobody has voted for (such as the European Union, "the elites",
globalism, the Davos Forum, etc.) and that there are policies underway
to redistribute wealth into fewer and fewer hands. But this hoarding of
wealth is presented as a conspiracy theory, in which the UN Agenda 2030
is mixed with the replacement of the native population by immigrants who
work for worse economic conditions. The West as a paradigm is a value in
decline and those responsible are being sought. But if it is a value in
decline, and the West lives in a kind of permanent negativity (whether
it was the 2008 crisis, the real estate crash, the pandemic, the war
between Russia and Ukraine, the Red Sea blocked by the Houthis...), the
rest of the world has the feeling of living in an unprecedented economic
boom.
We are talking about the appearance on the scene of the new BRICS+ bloc.
What multilateralism would be. In particular, there are three large
countries, China, Russia and India, which aspire to be direct
competitors - they already are - of the United States, the European
Union and Japan. Their growth in recent decades has been so strong that
they are taking all the markets away from the West and this implies
relevant geopolitical changes. For example, practically all of Africa
looks at this bloc and moves away from the former colonial powers as if
from the plague. As we have said before, we have seen it in 2024 in
Senegal, Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Chad... the list is long and goes
from Southeast Asia to Latin America.
What should be highlighted about the BRICS+ bloc is its defense of the
economy above all else. And this defense includes looking the other way
on the political issue. Many of the admitted states are authentic
dictatorships. A form of authoritarian democracy is also being exported
from Russia that is taking root among the world's extreme right. This is
illiberalism, like that of the Hungarian Orban (who has presided over
the EU in the second half of 2024 to the chagrin of Brussels) or that of
the Turkish Erdogan.
But if the BRICS+ gave the appearance of being unstoppable at their
Kazan summit, held in October of this year, at the end of the American
electoral race, the famous "deep state" that controls the foreign policy
of Washington and Brussels, has delighted us with some incredible coups.
To give a few examples, in just a few weeks elections were annulled in
Romania, accusing the far right - which won - of Russian interference; a
colour revolution was attempted in Georgia, with the prime minister (of
French origin, moreover) refusing to cede power to the winner
(pro-Russian) and encouraging people to take to the streets to protest;
in Moldova the option of joining the EU won by a narrow margin in
elections that were, to say the least, suspicious. These blows indicate
that the game is still in play and that the BRICS+ will have to work
much harder to overtake the Westerners.
It is clear that, after the failure of progressivism and the arrival of
Trump to power, after the results of the last European elections, and
those of the countries of Eastern Europe, public opinion has been
turning to the right. We can only confront this capitalist world with
organisation from below, with clear revolutionary objectives, since
history teaches us that aspiring to reforms is bread for today
(sometimes not even that) and hunger for tomorrow. For this reason, the
anarchist organizations of our current are recognizing that we are on a
necessary path of weaving together with a clear international strategy,
and with adaptable tactics to advance social force. We have been warning
that building utopia is not only a question of belief, we must not lack
hope but also material means and revolutionary theory to carry it forward.
https://www.regeneracionlibertaria.org/2025/01/04/crisis-y-guerras-del-capitalismo-global-un-analisis-internacional-del-2024/
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