by Dimitris Konstantakopoulos
The French crisis seems now to approach what was described in the past as a classical pre-revolutionary situation.
This fact does confirm, once more, that we are facing an international crisis of a depth comparable to the crisis of the ’30s and capable of producing revolutions, wars, the rise of totalitarianism and other phenomena of comparable violence and depth (radicalism).
The EU crisis can lead to various outcomes. It can lead to the opening of Europe towards a radically better European order. Or it can lead to the decomposition of Europe into a galaxy of small relatively impotent states, in fierce competition between themselves and under the power of the international financial capital, of Americans and the NATO.
As has already happened with the crisis of the ’30s, this one is also open to various possible solutions, some of them left progressive, some far rightist, withstanding the relativity of such terms, because of the way they have been used for so long time.
France does not belong exactly neither to the privileged North of the continent or its destroyed and exploited South. It is also the mother of the great revolutionary and democratic traditions of Europe. That makes it probably a decisive key for the direction the whole continent will take.
The outcome of the coming struggles in France will depend upon the quality of the leaders of the French popular movement and the French Left. It will also depend upon the creation or not of a European political subject, of an “International” of the (real) Left. This work has delayed enormously and it has received a huge blow in its very beginning, because of the capitulation and the political and ideological decomposition of SYRIZA, which, for four years (2011-2015) has been the international symbol of the radical Left.
Another huge difference with the ’30s is the capacity of the financial oligarchy, or groups of it, to use the products of the fantastic scientific and technological revolution, including artificial intelligence, in order to influence, or even produce political events and even fake political realities, through the Social Media. We have seen all that in the case of Cambridge Analytica and in various revolts or electoral events. Add to that the huge, qualitative enlargement of all the capacities of the Empire in the environment of an already existing Capitalism of Surveillance.
We have witnessed all that also in action in Greece, with the Empire being finally able to control, manipulate and use, for its own purposes, the SYRIZA leadership.
Only a leadership and a large movement of very high intellectual and moral qualities, collective and international, can lead with success the struggle for a social, ecological and independent Europe, absolutely necessary for establishing a multipolar international order, as a transition stage towards a new human civilization, without which humanity will hardly survive.
