Amid the media din of October 2026, bourgeois thought is capable of discerning only chaos. But this chaos is merely an illusion: behind diplomatic manoeuvres, government crises, and police repression lies the same underlying physiology of capitalism’s structural crisis.
The liberal mythology of “human rights” and the inviolability of sanctions crumbles when the survival of monopolies is at stake. US imperialism, whose very symbol is the Statue of Liberty, faced with logistical strangulation caused by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz amidst the war in the Middle East, resumes purchases of Belarusian potash. In doing so, it replenishes the budget of a state which liberal journalism, long before the war in Ukraine and the bloody Belarusian August of 20201, had branded as Europe’s “last dictatorship”. Capital – no matter under what flag it realises profit – cares nothing for the political façade. For it, there is no difference between imposing sanctions and lifting them; the choice depends solely on what is more profitable at any given moment. And in this specific instance, when US agribusiness desperately needs to drive down costs, liberal journalists are forced either to shamefully hide inconvenient facts in dry stock-market reports or hastily construct an ideological alibi for the deal.
We are witnessing not a conspiracy of deceivers, but, according to Engels’s precise formulation, ideology in the strict sense of the word. A journalist writing about ‘humanitarian necessity’ is, in most cases, genuinely convinced that they are thinking in moral terms.
When the economic base demands the abolition of political principles, the ideological apparatus serving capital employs three main tools to justify this contradiction:
- The humanitarian alibi (“The fight against global hunger”): the lifting of sanctions on potash fertilisers is explained not by the drive of US agrarian capital to preserve its rate of profit, but by a pathetic “concern for global food security”. Journalists set out to prove that fertilisers are an exceptional, humanitarian commodity, without which the so-called Global South would find itself on the brink of famine. The funding of an ally of Russian imperialism is magically repackaged as a “necessary act of saving humanity”.
- The rhetoric of the “lesser evil” and pragmatism: the business press suddenly remembers Realpolitik. Concessions are presented as a forced and bitter, yet “politically wise”, concession to reality in order to curb domestic inflation. “Pragmatism” and Realpolitik here are not an explanation of what is happening, but merely a verbal capitulation to it, designating the external, mechanical interaction of capitals (competition for the fertiliser market) as the cause, whereas a far deeper law – the law of capital accumulation – operates beneath this competition. It is claimed that protecting the American consumer’s pocket and the profitability of Midwestern farmers is currently more critical than isolating the Belarusian “police state” (but can any bourgeois states exist without police functions?).
- The sins of omission (shifting the focus): mainstream media simply marginalise this news. If the regime’s brutality in August 2020 or its complicity in the war was front-page news, the lifting of sanctions against “Belaruskali” is published in fine print in specialised economic sections. This is presented as a routine bureaucratic adjustment to the licences of the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), omitting the fact that this very operation fills the coffers of that very same Belarusian state.
Thus, the press performs its classical function: it masks class and corporate interests under the cloak of objective necessity, proving that imposing sanctions is a triumph of human rights, whilst lifting them for the benefit of monopolies is a triumph of common sense.
In reality, we have before us a textbook example of how the economic base shatters the idealistic superstructure: all democratic demagogy is cast aside to secure cheap raw materials and preserve profitability.
At the very same time, at the other end of Europe, capital openly devours its own proletariat. The fatal eviction of an 87-year-old Spanish woman by a property investment company in order to drive up rents is not a “system failure”, but the true face of the market, where housing finally loses its use-value (a roof over one’s head), transforming into a pure abstraction of financial return – fictitious capital feeding on basic human needs.
How and why does this happen? Confronted with the inexorable fall in the rate of profit in the real sector of the economy, surplus global capital frantically seeks new spheres for its self-valorisation and finds salvation in monopoly rent. Transnational mega-funds buy up entire residential neighbourhoods not to manage real property, but to “securitise” these square metres of concrete – to turn expected rental income into derivatives and securities traded on the stock exchange. A flat ceases to be a physical object and becomes merely a title of ownership, granting the right to continuously clip coupons. Capital consciously takes hostage the most inelastic human biological need – the need for shelter, which the proletarian physically cannot refuse. Consequently, rent is transformed into a mechanism of ruthless secondary exploitation: first, the industrial or platform capitalist extracts surplus value from the worker during the labour process, and then the financial rentier, via rent, expropriates the lion’s share of their wages (the cost of reproducing labour-power), condemning the masses to perpetual debt bondage or homelessness. Capital, by its nature alienated from society, appears here in all its stark, parasitic nakedness: a resource social in origin (the housing stock of an entire city, built by the labour of many generations) appropriated privately by a narrow group of financial title owners. It is precisely this contradiction which, in Marx’s own formulation, becomes ever more glaring and necessitates the abolition of this relation.
The mass protests and tent encampments, together with the snap elections called by Sánchez’s government amidst the influx of 80,000 migrants – this global reserve army of labour, proletarianised and uprooted by the ruthless penetration of imperialist capital – merely expose the total paralysis of the bourgeois state. Migration is the objective consequence of imperialist expansion, which destroys traditional ways of life and expels impoverished proletarian masses onto the world market as a cheap commodity – labour-power. Meanwhile, the oligarchy privatises housing, whilst the left parties, mired in parliamentary cretinism, perform a function essential to the preservation of capital, acting as a lightning rod for proletarian anger.
On the other flank of the global crisis, the imperialist slaughter in Eastern Europe continues to operate as a gigantic mechanism for the physical destruction of surplus capital and “surplus population”. The attempts of the Indian bourgeoisie to act as a mediator in unblocking the Black Sea are not abstract peacemaking, but the pragmatic step of one of the imperialist predators seeking to save the logistical arteries of the world market. Stable supplies of cheap Black Sea grain and fertilisers are vital to Indian capital in order to drive down the cost of the food basket as much as possible and thus reduce the cost of reproducing its own multi-million-strong labour force, keeping the wages of the local proletariat at a minimum in order to siphon off super-profits. Simultaneously, acting as an arbiter between powers bogged down in war, Indian financial capital, strengthened by combined development, cynically turns another’s conflict into an increase in its own “geopolitical” weight, legitimising its claims to full participation in the redivision of spheres of influence.
And whilst capital’s industrial and energy infrastructure and the lives of the proletariat are being ground down in Ukraine, the Estonian bourgeoisie, “just in case”, concentrates elite troops at Narva and exchanges the surplus value accumulated in Tallinn’s treasury for American HIMARS. This is a specific, localised instance of the redistribution of already plundered wealth under conditions of mutual distrust between capitalists, which paralyses the entire region.
At the same time, Russian imperialism is consolidating its home front, methodically purging the political field: the fabrication of serious criminal cases against opposition activists is the classic preventive terror of the dictatorship of capital, a dictatorship gripped by panic over the prospect of an internal social explosion. Concurrently, the state seeks to levy a tribute on the population’s very need for information outside the Kremlin’s control, considering the introduction of charges for VPN traffic on 5G networks. Temporary technical hurdles merely delay this robbery, but the class objective is clear – to force the proletariat to pay out of its own pocket for its cell in the digital prison.
This chronicle leaves no room for illusions. Moribund capital will not stop of its own accord. It will continue to throw the elderly onto the streets in Madrid, drive workers to the slaughter in the trenches of the Donbas, and lock up dissenters in prisons. Humanity faces a ruthless material choice: either the international proletariat, led by a world communist party, will smash this rotting system, or capitalism will inevitably drag the world into the barbarism of total annihilation.
Footnotes
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- Over the course of just a few days, security forces threw more than 10,000 citizens into overcrowded detention centres and subjected them to torture, while several protesters were killed. Not a single criminal case was ever opened against security personnel in connection with any of the beatings or acts of violence. ↩