PDF-Version: Le Prolétaire – Crimes of War, Crimes of Capital

In recent months, “Nazi barbarism” and “German sadism” have once again come to the attention of the bourgeois press, the “right” and the “left”: polemics on the prescription of war crimes, the anniversary of the Iiberation of the camps, the anniversary of the victory of democracy over fascism.

On this occasion, bourgeois ideologues of all stripes, and above all the pseudo-communists of the PCF[1], once again showed their total inability to understand social developments. To explain the gigantic massacres and destruction of the 1939-1945 war, they appeal to the most obsolete banalities of moralising idealism: the “madness” of certain “criminals” or that German “sadism” which we were already told about in 1914.

But it would be a serious mistake to see in this flood of stupidity, which the radio and the press are pouring on the dulled masses, a manifestation of “stupidity”. On the contrary, it is proof of intelligence, class intelligence: the bourgeoisie puts all its chatter and scribblers in line to prevent the proletariat from understanding the true nature of capitalist society, and the true causes of massacres and destructions. It is up to us communists to tear off the bourgeoisie’s mask, to oppose the “truth” of bourgeois conservation with the revolutionary truth of the proletariat. In this short article we will first recall the general causes of imperialist wars, to then examine the particular forms that emerged in Germany.

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The bourgeoisie presents the history of its domination as an era of progress interspersed with some “accidental” disasters. But the reality is very different, and the whole history of the bourgeoisie is made up of violence, starting with the bloody looting of South and Central America, the extermination of the Indians of North America and the slave trade, which are at the root of the rise of European capitalism; and ending with the gigantic convulsions of the imperialist era. However, these do not have the same causes as the massacres of the era of primitive accumulation: it is because it is no longer a question today of the bourgeoisie appropriating the wealth (land, material and human resources) of previous societies, but of facing the inherent contradiction of the developed capitalist mode of production: the contradiction between the socialisation of production and private appropriation, between the tremendous expansion of the social forces of production and the mercantile form of this production.

The laws of this mercantile economy require constant growth in production and accumulation, but these same laws prevent the products of this production from being realised, in other words, from being sold. Whether “liberal” or “totalitarian”, “private” or “state”, capitalism is unable to overcome this contradiction. The only thing it can do is to solve it temporarily by a vast bloodletting, by a massive destruction of the productive forces, of dead and living capital, of the means of production and of the producers.

This is the real cause of imperialist wars: the need for a colossal bloodletting that weakens the patient, but allows him to survive the crisis of apoplexy. And the work of the agents of the bourgeoisie within the proletariat is precisely to prevent the latter from taking advantage of this momentary weakness of the bourgeoisie by breaking its neck for once and for all; to prevent the proletariat from finding its international unity by ensuring its solidarity with each national bourgeoisie “which unleashes traditional values against the barbaric aggressor…”, to prevent it from understanding the true causes of its sufferings.

The “destructive nihilism” is therefore not specifically German; it is attributable to world capitalism as a whole, which periodically has no choice but to embark on a path of destruction. (The Germans showed a remarkable bourgeois instinct by not blowing up Paris in 1944: Marxist theory and experience show that it is in the most destroyed countries that the recovery of the economy is most staggering)

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It then remains to talk about the concentration camps and the extermination of Jews. A few years ago, we devoted a long article (“Auschwitz or the Great Alibi” – Programme Communiste No 11. 1960) to this latter question, which we can only summarise very briefly here. We have shown that Nazi anti-semitism was the reaction of the petty bourgeoisie’s defense against the offensive of big capital; that this threatened class concentrated economic ruin on its identifiable subgroup: the Jews; that the Nazis wanted no more than to get rid of this “relative overpopulation”, but that no one wanted it; that during the war, Jews, expropriated and deprived of means of existence “had to” be killed, and were first essentially killed by over-exploitation, as long as they could be used for labour, before being massacred with the complicity and blessing of world imperialism.

What we want to highlight here are the general and fundamental aspects of concentration camps. The camps were above all exploitation, the over-exploitation to death of a non-free and easily renewable labour power. The camps therefore made it possible to kill two birds with one stone: slaughter of labour power and production of profit.

One might be surprised that capitalism, based on the exploitation of the “free” wage earner, has thus embarked on a large-scale exploitation of forced labour. This fact is not new, however: Marx showed a long time ago that capitalism can use past forms of exploitation, and we know countless examples of this over-exploitation of non-free workers: let us only recall here the hundreds, thousands of blacks, forced workers of the Great French Democracy, who died building the port of Dakar and the African road and rail network; or in certain southern US states, the Mexican agricultural workers “imported” more or less illegally and subjected to a “peonage” regime which is nothing less than a time-limited form of slavery.

Of course, capitalism cannot generalise slavery, it needs workers who can be exploited “freely”, because only rudimentary tools can be entrusted to a slave: a pickaxe, yes, but a bulldozer would quickly be put out of order (it is not by chance that the Russians dissolved their forced labour camps a few years ago).

But Germany at war also needed industrial labour. And to prevent sabotage, it was necessary to exercise on the prisoners this extraordinary terror, terror made possible by the fact that, unlike the ancient proprietor who wanted to keep his slaves alive, capitalism only wanted to decimate them.

Overexploitation, forced labour, undernourishment, factory despotism, what were the camps if not the magnified image of capitalist society, at the same time as the bourgeois way of solving the problem of unemployment!

Naturally, the bourgeoisie refused to recognise itself in this image. It screamed “sadism” and “barbarism”. In reality, there was nothing sadistic about the organisation of the camps; their purpose was not at all to make people suffer “for pleasure”. The brutalities, tortures and massacres were only a means to an end that had nothing to do with “feelings”, good or bad. They simply haven’t yet found a way to overexploit and kill people “nicely”! The five-year-olds who were killed by English capital in its spinning mills (in England in the 19th century and in Shanghai in the 20th century) knew something about it.

But even more striking than the occasional sadism of the guards and executioners is their enormous indifference. And certainly this indifference is horrible. But there’s nothing German about it. It is the rational indifference of capital, for which man is but a means of producing capital. The barbarism of the camps is the barbarism of capitalist society itself, which, by transforming living labour into commodities, has totally submitted it to capital; the atrocity of this society in which man lives or dies only for capital, in which he is exploited today, put out of work tomorrow and massacred the day after tomorrow, according to the needs of capital.

In this vast rational enterprise that the camps were, the barbarism of capitalist society was exposed in full view. So all the lawyers of the bourgeoisie hastened to cover up its inhuman nudity, to blame a people or individuals for this horror. We have no mercy whatsoever for the executors of the high works of capital, and if the proletariat could have manifested itself it would have shot them without any other form of trial (all, not just those of one of the two imperialist camps!). But their solemn condemnation, on the part of their compatriots and accomplices, is nothing more than a sinister farce aimed at relieving world capitalism of its responsibility.

Even anarchists and individualist and moralising anarchoids play their part in this enterprise of mystification. If man were “good”, they say, he would refuse to exploit and slaughter his own kind, he would accept to die rather than to kill. So it is man who is guilty, not capitalism, not that society that forces man every day to starve his own kind if he wants to eat, and periodically to kill him so as not to be killed. This society that makes man inhuman by forcing him to devour his brother to live.

The concentration camps, like the other horrors of imperialist war, are by no means the work of Satan, of a mysterious and demonic human (or German) nature. They only highlight the need for the destruction of this barbaric society, the need for communist revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Source: Le Prolétaire n°22, 1965

[1] PCF: Parti Communiste Français, French Communist Party.