A-Infos (en) Italy, FDCA, Cantiere #43 - The Emperor Has No Clothes - Mark Carney at Davos and the End of the World Order - Cristiano Valente (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

We knew that the history of the rules-based international order was 
partly false. That the strongest would exempt themselves when it suited 
them. That trade rules were applied asymmetrically. And we knew that 
international law applied with varying rigor depending on the identity 
of the accused or the victim. ---- With these lapidary words, spoken 
during the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, 
Switzerland, on January 19, Mark Joseph Carney, economist, banker, 
leader of the Liberal Party, and Prime Minister of Canada, revealed the 
true essence of the global capitalist economic system: a single, vast 
arena where economic and political hegemony is based exclusively on the 
balance of power between various state economies, and where any treaty 
or alleged international law becomes the norm and enforceable only after 
their crystallization.

These are not words that escaped the Senate, as Carney has held top 
economic and financial positions, first in the private sector at Goldman 
Sachs, one of the world's largest investment banks, headquartered at 200 
West Street in Lower Manhattan, New York; and later in the public 
sector, working in the Canadian Finance Department and then as Deputy 
Governor of the Bank of Canada. From 2008 to 2013, he served as the 
eighth Governor of the Bank of Canada, addressing the effects of the 
late 2000s financial crisis, and from 2013 to 2020, he served as 
Governor of the Bank of England. From 2011 to 2018, he served as Chair 
of the G20 Financial Stability Board, and finally, as Canada's 
twenty-fourth Prime Minister, starting in March 2025.

The awareness that the global economic system - which in the economic 
literature of the bourgeoisie and its lackeys is hypocritically 
described as a gathering of men and institutions of noble and high moral 
sentiments, bearers of democratic values, tending towards the continuous 
improvement and development of human progress - is in reality a cynical 
fiction is so acquired that in the continuation of his speech the Prime 
Minister goes so far as to state:

We no longer rely only on the strength of our values, but also on the 
value of our strength. We are building this strength at home.[...]By the 
end of this decade, we will double our defence spending, and we will do 
so in a way that strengthens our domestic industries.[...]We are 
therefore working with our NATO allies, including the Nordic-Baltic 
Eight,[1]to further protect the Alliance's northern and western flanks, 
including through Canada's unprecedented investments in over-the-horizon 
radar,[2]submarines, aircraft, and ground troops.

The Prime Minister's speech, tragically appreciated by our progressives, 
continues with the clear affirmation that the "old order will not 
return" and indicates the unity of these medium-sized state powers and 
any other "country willing to walk this path with us" as the only viable 
path for a possible other world order, with the aim of placing these 
"variable geometry" aggregates on an equal footing with the current 
hegemonic powers (USA, Russia and China).

The argument essentially states that in a world where economic and 
military power prevails, the goal is to become stronger economically and 
militarily, or at least equal. All the rhetoric about the magnificent 
and progressive fortunes of the capitalist economic system boils down to 
a playground dispute over who has the most muscle (weapons) to deploy. 
This strategy, preparatory to military conflict as the final stage of an 
increasingly exacerbated competitiveness, seems untroubled by this 
latest sorcerer's apprentice, as do all his admirers.

But every increase in strength of some temporarily allied state or 
interstate powers can only be accompanied by a decline in other 
economies and other commodity and commercial sectors. The uneven 
development of the capitalist economic system, intrinsically impeded by 
continuous and harmonious global development, appears to concern neither 
the Prime Minister nor the Italian political class at all; from the 
liberal conservative sectors, led by former European Central Bank 
Governor and former Prime Minister Mario Draghi, to the so-called 
sovereignists and the supposed progressives.

Indeed, the latter will tear their clothes one day and the next, so that 
the European Union becomes, through the procedure of majority and no 
longer unanimity, an economically and politically united entity; which 
is true even if we have already analysed in other pages the transience 
of such a project, due to the competitiveness of the different 
bourgeoisies and of the various European states manifested in the same 
rearmament projects and in the same industrial competition and could 
only represent another economic and military power, in opposition to the 
United States of America and China, exacerbating the level of 
inter-imperialist conflict. In this long list of useful idiots it is not 
possible to forget also those sectors of the left, self-defined as 
radical, who in the wretched logic of "the enemy of my enemy is my 
friend", end up sponsoring and cheering for the BRICS[3]in an 
anti-American function.

The reality is that in the long global economic crisis of capitalism, 
the decline in global growth risks bringing us concretely to the brink 
of a new, war-torn world war. The kidnapping of Maduro, the Venezuelan 
head of state, was the consistent result of the abandonment of the old 
world order, constructed to the advantage of American imperialism since 
1945; an imperialism that, following the Second World War, had dethroned 
and replaced the previously dominant British imperialism. All the 
institutions that had been built to defend that power, starting with the 
United Nations, are no longer fit for purpose in sustaining American 
hegemony.

The official establishment in Davos on January 22, 2026, of the Board of 
Peace, a private club of states of which Donald Trump is president for 
life, complete with a military contingent and police force, is intended 
for now to oversee the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip and ultimately 
"promote stability, restore accountable and legitimate government, and 
ensure lasting peace in areas affected or threatened by conflict." 
Access to the Board is only possible by invitation from the president 
himself, subject to the payment of a sum of one billion dollars.

After Ukraine and the Middle East (again), Latin America is also 
becoming a battleground between the hegemonic imperialist powers. China 
has now become the main trading partner of many South American states. 
Chinese companies have extensive and lucrative interests in both the oil 
and mining sectors. They have invested in Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina 
in lithium, which they use to supply their battery industry, and they 
have interests in the mining sector, particularly in copper mined in 
Chile and in the iron ore sector in Peru. In Peru, they effectively 
control the major port of Chancay, giving them the ability to dominate 
and dominate South American trade in the Pacific. Just like Cristobal 
and Balboa, the two main ports on the Panama Canal,[4]the second busiest 
artificial navigation line on the planet after the Suez Canal, managed 
until the end of 2025 by the Chinese conglomerate CK Hutchison, to which 
the Panamanian government, precisely because of pressure from Trump, 
blocked the concession on January 30th by means of a decree, resuming 
control of the two ports and thus opening a further international crisis 
through an immediate appeal by the Chinese government against the 
Panamanian government to the International Chamber of Commerce, an 
organisation that manages commercial disputes between States and private 
companies, and as a further immediate retaliation by intensifying 
customs inspections on important Panamanian imports, such as coffee and 
bananas.

China, still the "world's workshop" due to its low labor costs and 
overcapacity, geared toward continually increasing its exports, has long 
secured its own supplies of raw materials, as well as those of many 
other strategic ports around the world, including the port of Piraeus in 
Greece, one of the largest in Europe and controlled by the Chinese 
state-owned giant Cosco Shipping. This is forcing Trump to dust off the 
Monroe Doctrine, seeking to rebrand Central and South American states as 
his own backyard. China, in fact, has been one of Maduro's biggest 
supporters, purchasing his oil and providing him with loans and military 
assistance.

The US intervention in Venezuela therefore signifies a reassertion of 
control and dominance in the Western Hemisphere, and this time the 
intervention took place without any need to disguise it as a need to 
export democracy, just as American military interventions were 
forked-tonguedly justified following the Second World War, from Korea to 
Vietnam, to the Gulf Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. From the first 
bizarre accusations of drug trafficking against President Maduro, it was 
immediately clear, even by President Trump himself, that the true and 
only interest in the intervention in Venezuela is its oil and the 
resources needed to maintain US dominance, which is increasingly shaky 
due to its enormous and growing public debt. This stems from the 
profound economic crisis in key sectors, such as manufacturing, caused 
by the policy of offshoring. This outsourcing was attempted to reverse 
with tariffs, even though the US Supreme Court ruling of February 20 
temporarily reduced their economic impact. This increased international 
chaos, with Trump's need to confirm his tariff policy with new federal 
laws rather than those previously used, risking arriving at the midterm 
elections, scheduled for next November, as a classic "lame duck," that 
is, with a hostile Congress. The US federal debt, which has grown for 
decades, now stands at approximately $40 trillion, meaning the US 
government pays interest over $1 trillion annually. Although the BRICS 
countries are trying to avoid the dollar as much as possible for their 
trade and financial transactions, the dollar's dominance remains strong, 
which is why, after Maduro's kidnapping, Trump mockingly and not at all 
paradoxically declared that "China will be able to continue buying the 
oil it used to get from Venezuela, only it won't pay for it in yuan like 
it did with Maduro, but in dollars."

This tenacious defense of the dollar as an international currency of 
exchange has deep roots. The 2003 intervention in Iraq against Saddam 
Hussein, who notoriously did not possess any weapons of mass 
destruction, stems from the attempt to exchange his oil not for dollars 
but for other currencies, particularly the recently introduced euro. 
Similarly, in 2011, Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama intervened in 
Libya, in coalition with France and Great Britain, against Gaddafi, who 
was also guilty of seeking to free himself from the dollar's dominance. 
This need for control and economic supremacy by the Trump administration 
is the underlying reason behind its request for the acquisition of 
Greenland, which, although currently withdrawn, aims to completely 
appropriate the immense resources present in its subsoil, as well as 
control over the trade routes that will increasingly open up due to the 
melting of the glaciers. Indeed, according to a report by the U.S. 
Geological Survey (the U.S. government agency that studies land and 
natural dynamics), oil and gas deposits (estimated at 13% of the world's 
oil and 30% of its gas resources), gold reserves, as well as rubies, 
diamonds, and zinc, have been discovered beneath the Arctic island's 
surface. A veritable energy Eldorado, until now covered by rapidly 
melting ice due to global warming, is now revealing its full potential. 
These undiscovered resources are valued at $300-400 billion, according 
to the aforementioned report.

Greenland, seven times the size of Italy but with 56,000 inhabitants 
(the majority of whom are Inuit), geographically American but 
politically Danish, was a little-known land until a few decades ago. Too 
distant from the global geopolitical stage, too underpopulated, and too 
cold. In short, too Arctic. Today's Greenland is coveted by many, and 
the Arctic more generally is a coveted route for many countries. From 
China, which calls itself a quasi-Arctic state and talks about the Polar 
Silk Road, to the United States and Europe, which have seized on the 
potential not only of the new Nordic trade routes but also of the 
immense energy and mineral resources these places hold.

It's been known for years that Greenland's subsoil contains uranium. But 
it was nearly inaccessible and considered a kind of forbidden fruit. So 
much so that Denmark itself, which remains responsible for the island's 
foreign and defense policy, recently changed its zero-tolerance stance 
toward nuclear power. For now, Canada, Australia, and Kazakhstan are the 
major exporters. But given their enormous local reserves, Denmark and 
Greenland could also join the club, giving Denmark itself a leading role 
in the uranium market. Beyond uranium, global warming is revealing the 
presence of other treasures in its subsoil: vast reserves of iron, 
copper, gold, and rare earths, which international mining giants and 
countries like South Korea and China are beginning to interest. With the 
melting of the ice, villages that once depended on shrimp fishing, a 
crucial sector for the local economy, are disappearing. The shrimp have 
moved further north, seeking colder waters, resulting in rising 
unemployment and a skyrocketing suicide rate among the native 
population. Thus, a truly insane economic and political competition 
between the major powers, born out of the need for ever-increasing 
profit for the ruling classes, is leading us to World War III.

The reasons for a possible and imminent armed conflict between the major 
economic powers as an intrinsic necessity of the capitalist mode of 
production

War becomes all the more necessary the more it claims to save capitalism 
from its irreversible crisis. A crisis that grows ever deeper due to its 
overproduction of goods, geared not toward satisfying real needs, but 
toward profit and the constant decline of its interest rates.

Competition forces every business, from the smallest and most marginal 
to the largest monopolistic cartels, to innovate production, 
progressively replacing living labor with the dead labor of machines and 
new technologies. But only from living labor can profit be derived, by 
making the proletariat work longer than their wages. Thus, as the 
portion of goods produced by the dead labor of machines increasingly 
dominates, the profit rate, which is the only thing that interests the 
investor, will progressively decline. Thus, the lower the rate of profit 
becomes, the more difficult it becomes to find an investor willing to 
risk their capital for a progressively limited potential gain. The 
abnormal development of financial capitalism arises precisely from this 
implicit contradiction of the capitalist economic system, replacing the 
production of goods with a future bet on various stocks and bonds in 
that market, veritable casino, that are the various financial stock 
exchanges, where alternating financial fortunes or ruin are taken into 
account, but where the winner is always the house-that is, capitalism as 
a general class.

But capital, like savings, if not profitably invested, is progressively 
eroded by inflation, and any space left vacant by a lack of investment 
is occupied by increasingly fearsome competition. Thus, more and more 
capital from rich countries emigrates and seeks to be profitably 
invested in countries where backwardness curbs the crisis of 
overproduction, where labor and raw materials are cheaper, allowing for 
a broader market in which to sell the goods produced profitably. Thus, 
capitalists investing abroad will increasingly pressure their own states 
to develop imperialist policies to protect foreign investments. The 
countless military interventions since the Second World War, from Korea 
to Vietnam, across the Middle East, from Iraq to Afghanistan and even 
Ukraine, have this sole rationale . Just as the countless operations 
hypocritically called peacekeeping operations actually aim to protect 
national economic interests, maritime routes, and the specific interests 
of national industries, such as our ENI, a global energy giant with a 
presence in Libya and operations in the Gulf of Guinea, which has a 
memorandum of understanding with our Navy, renewed in February of this 
year. These imperialist policies, therefore, are necessitated by the 
need to secure new markets, labor, and low-cost raw materials (primarily 
energy).

But the more an imperialist power rearms to expand its economic sphere 
of influence, the more other powers, to avoid being swept away by 
competition, will be driven to develop similar policies, as the Canadian 
prime minister teaches. Hence the need for rearmament, a categorical 
imperative for all national bourgeoisies, including the various 
bourgeoisies of old Europe no longer, or increasingly less, protected by 
the umbrella of NATO and therefore the United States. Furthermore, the 
weapons produced, in addition to guaranteeing an unlikely deterrent, 
must be sold at a profit, and possibly consumed like all commodities, to 
make room for new weapons. Thus, the potential for inter-imperialist 
conflicts will increase. So to resolve the capitalist crisis, in the 
hope that no Dr. Strangelove can actually trigger a nuclear conflict, we 
move on to the destruction of overproduced capital, goods and labour 
force, through the classic conventional warfare,[5]for a new season of 
investments and recovery that will inevitably arrive at the exact same 
conclusion, but with ever greater means and destructive force, through 
ever greater expenditure on armaments, to the detriment of the already 
reduced welfare policies and therefore of indirect wages for the working 
masses, expenditure which is moreover socialised as it is paid and 
financed by the national states, therefore by general taxation, while 
the profits it generates will be privatised.

Faced with such a scenario, it becomes redundant to be surprised or 
condemned, as our democrats and progressives do, by an authoritarian 
shift in so-called democracies, which is nonetheless real. Imperialism, 
monopoly capitalism, is antithetical to democracy, both that 
etymologically expressed as "government of the people" and to liberal 
parliamentary democracy itself, the fruit of a still-evolving 
capitalism, which still needed to saturate national markets while 
simultaneously ensnaring and mediating, through parliamentary logic, a 
rising organized labor movement demanding its emancipation and freedom 
from exploitation. Competition itself, which in capitalist society tends 
to produce monopoly, inevitably leads to and determines the law of the 
jungle, that is, the law of the strongest. With the rise of monopolies 
and finance capital, just as the original free competition, which had 
evolved into the political competition of the various and diverse 
bourgeois tendencies, began to fade, the liberal-democratic regime 
within the bourgeoisie itself, now a cosmopolitan class, also tended to 
fade. Meanwhile, due to declining profit margins, there were 
increasingly fewer economic margins to redistribute, both to the middle 
classes and, even more so, to the working masses. To this end, the 
ruling class desperately needed the repressive apparatus of the state, 
such as the army and the police. Where repressive apparatuses are 
insufficient, because the labor movement organizations were not yet 
completely subdued and their organizational and social presence in the 
local communities was reduced, it became essential to mobilize the 
squadrismo, guaranteed by the right wing of the petty bourgeoisie and 
the impoverished middle class.

The development of ICE ( US Immigration and Customs Enforcement ), 
responsible for controlling customs and immigration security in the 
United States, established in 2003 but disproportionately increased in 
its personnel and organized and overfunded as a veritable military 
militia at the service of Trump, that is, the executive, as well as the 
establishment of Orban's TEK ( Terrorism and Terrorism Force ) in 
Hungary, founded in 2010 after his rise to power as a true praetorian 
force at his service, are for now paired with the security legislation 
of the Meloni government, even if the re-emergence in Italy of openly 
neo-fascist formations, from CasaPound to the entire right-wing galaxy 
responsible for the attack on the CGIL headquarters in 2021, to the 
newly minted political formation of General Vannacci, is explanatory of 
the new phase underway. Thus, capitalism and its recurring crises 
generate, along with monopolies, imperialism and that form of government 
we might define as "Bonapartism," in the sense of an authoritarian 
regime founded on personal prestige and plebiscitary popular consensus. 
However, this does not currently require transforming into a true, 
preventive counterrevolution like the one in Italy after the First World 
War. Instead, it involves radical right-wing forces that have governed, 
or continue to partially govern, countries like ours, the Netherlands, 
Austria, and Poland, or that could govern countries like France with the 
National Front, Germany with Alternative für Deutschland, and the United 
Kingdom with Reform.

The only force capable of stopping the prospect of a generalized war is 
the working class.

Our anti-imperialism is not limited to the United States or the West, 
but is opposed to every state. Our struggle is against all capitalism, 
which as an economic and social form continues to confirm its immutable 
barbarism in every geopolitical quadrant. From the economically and 
politically defined West, to the lands of East Asia, to the wretched 
lands of the Middle East and Africa, the economic interests of opposing 
national or transnational bourgeoisies continue to determine the global 
balance of power.

The latest episode of war, which broke out as we were writing these 
notes and which we don't know whether it will still be ongoing when they 
are published, is the joint attack by Israel and the United States on 
Iran, resulting in the assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. 
This war, too, has the sole and real goal of restoring American economic 
and political hegemony in the web of interests that is the Middle East, 
where multiple states are playing their part as regional powers, 
starting with Israel, a historic US ally, versus Iran, supported 
militarily by Russia and commercially by China; as well as Saudi Arabia, 
also a historic US ally but attempting to independently play an 
anti-Iranian and anti-Israeli role; and finally, Turkey itself, with its 
military presence in Syria.

The ongoing and impending wars are not the work of madmen in power. They 
are the natural product of a capitalist system that cyclically requires 
wars, as well as so-called natural disasters that are not, to revitalize 
its accumulation. Wars continue to be waged for control of markets, raw 
materials, energy sources, and rare earths, increasingly necessary for 
the development of production; through new technologies, far from 
neutral but indispensable for an ever-increasing extraction of surplus 
value from the workforce. Despite the countless advocates of a temperate 
capitalism, capable, they claim, of ensuring the right balance between 
the different interests of social classes, and the recurring master 
thinkers of supposedly new and unprecedented forms of capitalism, this 
new season of conventional conflicts testifies to the invariance of the 
capitalist economic system. The materiality and tragedy of the ongoing 
wars confirm the materiality of capitalism and the necessity of its 
overcoming. Wars, even with drones and advanced technologies, are fought 
for ancient reasons and in a conventional manner[6]on a defined 
battlefield. The opposing military forces are clearly recognizable and 
aim to defeat the adversary through logistical, technological and 
tactical superiority. If, as it appears to us, all this has some 
credibility, the need for an internationalist battle is increasingly 
pressing. We have no other choice.

Those who truly work for peace among peoples cannot simply tear their 
clothes over the supposed demise of so-called international law. In this 
case, the UN is the problem, not the solution. If we have reached these 
conclusions, it means that this body has formally balanced the 
inter-imperialist conflict, as the Canadian Prime Minister reminded us, 
for as long as it was convenient. The same will apply to the Board of 
Peace and other similar factions. It must be said, loudly, that there is 
only one war for freedom: the one waged in every country, Arab or 
Western, in the global North or South, by the exploited against the 
exploiters. Our task is to push workers against their bosses. This is 
possible if, in Italy, as throughout the world, the labor movement, its 
political organizations, and trade unions point the finger of blame at 
the increase in military spending and the war industries; Against the 
government, increasingly a business committee for the interests of the 
bourgeoisie, as Minister Crosetto, a good arms lobbyist and with 
disregard for his own safety, demonstrated with his presence in Dubai 
(United Arab Emirates) after war was declared; against the attempt to 
make workers, both male and female, and the younger generations, pay the 
price of their lords' war. Increased fuel prices, lower social spending, 
inadequate contracts, essentially worsening social conditions for the 
working masses: these are the decisions made and will be made, 
justifying them with war. Greater and widespread social involvement is 
needed.

The stronger the class struggle develops, the lower the risk of war 
between states.

Note

[1]The Nordic-Baltic Eight (NB8) is a regional cooperation format that 
brings together eight Nordic and Baltic countries, all members of NATO. 
The group includes Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, 
Lithuania, Norway and Sweden. This informal alliance coordinates the 
security and defence of Northern Europe and the Baltic Sea.

[2]Remotely piloted aircraft capable of operating and transmitting data 
at distances greater than the operator's direct visual or radio range, 
overcoming the curvature of the Earth. This capability allows for very 
long-range control, essential for military surveillance and attack missions.

[3]See Cristiano Valente, Pecunia non olet: economic relations between 
Israel and the BRICS , «il Cantiere», n. 40, 2025.

[4]See The Spider Web , «il Cantiere», n. 35, 2025.

[5]See Fabrizio Coticchia, Matteo Mazziotti di Celso, The future of 
rearmament: Causes, costs and dilemmas of a historic turning point , 
«ISPI», February 2026 (https://www.ispionline.it/it/il-futuro-del-riarmo).

[6]Conventional warfare is an armed conflict between states using 
traditional tactics and standard non-nuclear, chemical or biological 
weapons.

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