"War is a matter of vital importance for the State; it is the province of life and death, the path that leads to survival or annihilation. It is indispensable to study it thoroughly".
The Art of War, Sun Tzu.
10th/03/2004
(from the liner notes of Another World is Possible)
 . . .

Modern globalization, as a global system of neoliberalism, must be understood as a new war of territorial conquest.

The end of World War III, or "the Cold War", does not mean that the world has outgrown bipolarity and that stability now presides under the hegemony of the victor. At the end of this war there was, unquestionably, a loser (the socialist camp), but it is difficult to decide who was the winner. Western Europe ? The United States ? Japan ? All of the above ? Apparently, the defeat of the "Evil Empire" (as Reagan and Thatcher would call it) signified the opening of new markets without new owners. This therefore meant fighting for possession of these new markets, corresponding to a new competition of conquest.

Additionally, the end of the "Cold War" brought about a new form of international relations, through which the new fight for these new markets and territories produced a new world war, the fourth. This resulted, as in all wars, in a redefinition of nation states. And, much deeper than a redefinition of nation states, it evolved into a world order highly reminiscent of that which saw the conquests of America, Africa, and Oceania. A strange modernity this is, that advances backwards: the late twentieth century bears more in common with such brutal epochs of world history than with the placid and rational future deduced in several science-fiction novels. In the Post-Cold War world, vast territories, riches, and most importantly, forces of qualified labor, were waiting for a new boss.

However, there can only be one owner of the world, and there are many candidates vying for the position. To determine who is successful another war is needed, but it can be fought only between those who are self-proclaimed components of the "Good Empire".

If World War III was fought between capitalism and socialism (led by the United States and the USSR respectively), unfolding along different stages and different grades of intensity; World War IV takes place now between large financial associations, on a global stage and with an acute and constant intensity.

From the end of World War II until 1992, 149 wars took place throughout the world. The result, 23 million dead, leaves no doubts as to the intensity of this Third World War (data from UNICEF).

From the catacombs of international espionage to the sidereal space of the so-called Strategic Defense Initiative (Cowboy Ronald Reagan’s "War of the Galaxies"); from the (arenas) sand coasts of Playa Girón (Bay of Pigs) in Cuba, to the Mekong Delta in Vietnam ; from the frenetic nuclear arms race to the savage “coups d’états” in tragic Latin America ; from the ominous maneuvers of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s army to the CIA agents in Bolivia responsible for Che Guevara’s murder ; the miscalled "Cold War" reached temperatures so high that, in spite of the continually moving battleground and incessant rise-and-fall of the nuclear crisis (or precisely for these reasons), it ended by extinguishing the socialist network as a global system, and dissolving its potential as a social alternative.

World War III demonstrated the benefits of "total War" (in all parts and in all forms) for the victor: capitalism. However, the postwar scene provides the perfect set-up for a new theater of global operations: large extensions of "No-man’s Land" (due to the political, economic, and social destruction of Eastern Europe and the USSR), powers capable of expansion (the United States, Western Europe and Japan), worldwide economic crisis, and a new technological revolution: information. "In the same way that the Industrial Revolution permitted the replacement of muscle by machine, the current informational revolution allows for the replacement of the brain (at least of a more and more important number of its functions) by the computer. This "general cerebralization" of the means of production (the same in industry as in services) is accelerated by the “explosion” of new investigations in telecommunications and by the proliferation of cyberworlds." (Ignacio Ramonet. "La planété des désordres" in "Géopolitique du Chaos." Maniére de Voir 3. Le Monde Diplomatique (LMD). April 1997.)

The supreme rulers of capital, the financiers, start to develop their battle strategy based on the new world and the unsavory leftovers of the old. By imposing the technological revolution on the entire world, with the help of computers, from their offices and at their whim, the financial markets force their laws and views upon the entire planet. The "Globalization" of this new war is nothing more than the globalization of the logic of the financial markets. The national states (and their governors) have been transformed from directors of the economy into governed, rather remotely-controled, puppets by the foundation of the financial power: free trade. On top of this, the logic of the market takes advantage of the "porosity" that, in all social aspects of the world, provokes the development of telecommunications, and penetrates and owns all aspects of social activity. Finally, a world war that is totally total!

One of the first casualties of this new war is the national market. Like a speeding bullet in a closed room, the war initiated in the name of neoliberalism bounces off from one side to the other and wounds those who set it off. One of the fundamental bases of the modern capitalistic state’s power, the national market, is liquidated in favor of the canonizing of the new era of global financial trade. International capitalism takes declining national capital as its victim, beginning with the siphoning off of public powers. The coup has been very brutal and definitive for the nation states that are unable to muster the necessary force to successfully oppose the actions of international markets that transgress the interests of citizens and governments.

The caution and order flaunted as the inevitable product of the end of the "Cold War", the "new world order", was torn to bits in the neoliberal explosion. Worldwide capitalism sacrifices mercilessly something that can be passed on to the future as part of our great historical project: national capital. Corporations and countries crumble in minutes, not by the torment of the revolutionary proletariat, but from the blows of financial hurricanes. The child (neoliberalism) eats its parent (national capitalism), and step-by-step destroys all the discursive fallacies of capitalist ideology: in the new world order there is no democracy, or liberty, or equality, or fraternity.

In the global spectrum, which was the product of the end of the "Cold War", only one new battlefield is perceived in which, as in all battlefields, it is chaos that reigns.

At the end of the "Cold War", capitalism created a new warlike horror: the neutron bomb. The "virtue" of this weapon is that it only destroys life and respects constructions. Already it is possible to destroy entire cities (that is to say, the inhabitants) without being compelled to reconstruct them (and therefore pay for them). The weapons industry was quite pleased with itself, and the "irrationality" of nuclear bombs was supplanted by the “rationality" of neutron bombs. But a new violent "miracle" was to be discovered at the dawn of the Fourth World War: the financial bomb.

Because the new neoliberal bomb, in contrast to its atomic ancestor in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, does not destroy only the ‘polis’(Greek for ‘city’, in this case, the nation), imposing death, terror, and misery upon all its habitants ; or, in contrast to a neutron bomb, does not only "selectively" destroy. The neoliberal bomb, with greater impact, reorganizes and reorders its victims and recreates them as mere pieces in a giant (riddle) puzzle of economic globalization. After its destructive effects are unleashed, the result is not a mountain of smoky ruins, or tens of thousands of inert lives; it only brings about a suburb that adds itself to one of the commercial ‘megapolis’ of the new worldwide hypermarket and a labor force restyled for the new global labor market.
Marcos Subcommander of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN)
 Mexico
 From the mountains of Southeast Mexico
 June 1997

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