On 11 March we will go out in the street ‘NO to NATO and the EU! Basque Country anti-imperialist!”. It is a symbolic date, when the Basque Country refused entry into NATO. 37 years later we will leave to Euskal Herria working street, once again, to refuse the imperialist organization. But the demonstration is not a memorial act, because it is not a question of claiming the anti-imperialist Basque Country yesterday, but of organizing the anti-imperialist Basque Country today and tomorrow, giving a strong response to the current imperialist offensive.

There are very different positions, in the face of the last imperialist offensive of capital worldwide, and some analytical problems can be detected. On the one hand, the front of Ukraine (the NATO war against Russia) is inseparable from other imperialist fronts of the world of the Atlantic bourgeoisie. The destabilisation of the Middle East, the imperialist war against Libya and Syria, the betrayal of Western Sahara, the military and soft blows in Abya Yala, the destabilisation of Eastern Europe and the balkanisation projects of Russia, the punishments against Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, Algeria, Russia, etc., and the trade agreements between Taiwan and the region. They have a clear objective: to maintain American imperialist hegemony in the face of the emergence of new powers and the “multipolar world”.

On the other hand, any analysis of imperialism and the construction of the internationalist movement must necessarily be broken by the logic of geopolitics and international relations. To study imperialism is not only to study “international relations”, but also to place it in productive relations, within the framework of a materialistic analysis. In this sense, the dialectic “accumulation of wars” must understand the global offensive and its fronts of imperialist war: the imperialist war is not a dysfunction of the system, but a necessary condition to start a new cycle of accumulation and maintain the rate of profit of the bourgeoisie.

The political obligation of the internationalists and anti-imperialists is therefore to fight against NATO and the Europe of capital. As a class and as a working people in Europe, our mission is to increase the contradictions of the imperialist war in this war, repealing the imperialist bourgeoisie that crushes us as a class and as a people. That is, “the imperialist war, the transformation into a revolutionary civil war” and the failure of our imperialist bloc.

Of course, organizing a movement against imperialism and NATO is to say ‘no total war’, to reject the increase in war spending and militaristic escalation, but it goes further. As has been pointed out in the manifesto, it is to combat over-exploitation and precariousness of workers, cuts in political and social rights, repression and the police state. To say “NOT ATO and Europe of capital” is not, as Atlantic propaganda says, to be putinist or pro-forma, but to spread false dichotomies and traps. Saying ‘no to NATO or the EU’ is the first step towards reordering the European proletarian movement and the struggle of European working peoples. To say “no to NATO” is to say yes to the class; yes to the socialist independence of peoples. In short, the socialist and anti-imperialist Basque Country.

So next Saturday, 11 March, let us fill the streets of Bilbao!

Andrea Bartolo, member of Askapena