(August 8 Speeches)

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As American imperialism turns from one theatre of intervention to the next, Cuba is once again restored to its traditional place in American propaganda as the archvillain menacing the supposedly otherwise stable bourgeois society. As it prepares for the coming confrontation of world capitalism between the U.S. and China, the bourgeoisie revives the familiar spectre of Stalinist communism and adventurist terrorism while preparing its State for more intensified internal repression directed at the proletariat. Meanwhile, the recent strengthening of the social-democratic current within the Democratic Party furnishes the opposing bourgeois faction with another occasion to resurrect the anti-communist mythology through which the American State has, for generations, stirred up its own capacity to direct intensified violence against the proletariat, while its reformist political programs cloaked in socialist rhetoric, offer nothing but a program to stabilize the very capitalism it is supposedly corrupting. Both parties profit from this spectacle. One inflates the menace; the other invokes the violated conscience of democracy. Each strengthens the State, while the false opposition in the streets pleads only for the restoration of a more humane administration of the same bourgeois order. Against this entire comedy, the communist position remains one of complete indifference. The proletariat has no democratic rights to recover, only the dictatorship of capital to smash through the reconstitution of its independent class movement.

The bourgeoisie proclaimed the "end of history" after the dissolution of the USSR. For Marxists, this was never a historical turning point, but merely another episode in the development of world capitalism. The Russian counter-revolution had long ago consummated its developmentalist regime of State capitalism beneath socialist phraseology; the collapse of its State form altered nothing fundamental in the global domination of the totalizing capitalist relations. Bereft of its traditional ideological adversary, American imperialism discovered another in "international terrorism", around which it organized two decades of military intervention, patriotic mobilization, and domestic repression. Today, as the contradictions of capitalist accumulation sharpen and inter-imperialist antagonisms once again dominate the world horizon, the old anti-communist vocabulary is restored to service. The spectres now invoked are not revolutionary communism, but the harmless shadows of bourgeois radicalism, social democracy, and anti-fascism, all denounced as "communist" precisely because genuine communism has remained absent from the historical stage for decades. It is easier for the bourgeoisie to prosecute one faction of capital under the name of communism than to confront the spectral reappearance of the proletarian movement that lurks on the horizon.