They are the avoidable consequence of the bourgeoisie’s rule.
We will not allow the title of “defenders of peace and human rights” to be claimed by those who have never offered anything but an economic and social system that perpetrates daily the violent exploitation of wage work over the majority of humankind, and destroys the natural resources of our planet, everywhere and mercilessly – an economic and social system that has now become intolerable.
An economic and social system that is the expression of the capitalist mode of production which has always had to make war (and force us proletarians to make it unreservedly) to survive itself.
In just two years in Ukraine, the massacre, the slaughter, has become a fact and this, just like every other war sparked off by national bourgeois States, is a human catastrophe that must be strongly contrasted without whining rhetoric: whoever believes they are defending “freedom” or “international rights” or even “human rights” by fighting “dictatorship” in the name of whatever country is claiming “self determination” or is to be defended, is a victim and accomplice of the war propaganda of those accursed States.
The “special military operation” raging in Ukraine is gradually assuming the characteristics of an imperialist war “by proxy” between the Russian Federation and the United States of America.
The USA is attempting to preserve its global supremacy in the single-pole era it thought it had conquered with victory in the “cold war”, whilst the Russian Federation, with an outdated strategy of expansion and direct control over its own former borders, is attempting to affirm itself as a possible pole of aggregation for those States trying to free themselves from this supremacy.
In terms of political (diplomatic and military) relations, this war is none other than one of the expressions of the crisis of over-production, whose paroxysmal pace has been crushing the capitalist mode of production ever since the end of the cycle of accumulation that followed the dramatic conclusion of the second inter-imperial conflict. It is a sign and a departure point of the clash that is being prepared between an emerging gathering of power at the Russian-Chinese barycentre and that serving the USA.
In this international picture, the chronic Middle-Eastern conflict has become dramatically and cruelly keener.
The action carried out by the Hamas commando on 7 October, degenerating into an authentic pogrom, provided the excuse for the State of Israel (which was already pursuing a policy of daily harrassment and bloody repression of the proletarians and proletarianised masses concentrated in the Palestinian territories) to let loose in the Gaza Strip a war of extermination bordering on genocide and ethnic cleansing: in just over three months of bombing, the death toll is of 25,000 – with very few “warriors” affected but above all children, the disabled, the elderly, women... But on the other hand, Hamas’ cruel commando action was not a “spontaneous” reaction, a sort of intifada no longer armed with stones alone, to the increasingly aggressive policy of the Sionist settlements: it was an act of war organized by the armed branch of a part of the bigoted nationalist, religious bourgesoisie that wishes to demonstrate that it is more and better able than others to control (and sacrifice) over a million and a half of proletarians in Palestine, in the name of the cruel fetish of a tiny nation.
Just as we do not consider as isolated events the “special military operation” in Ukraine, the military manoeuvres off the coasts of China, the “neo-colonial” (sic) ones in Africa and all the other conflicts that have opened up for the control of commercial routes and strategic resources, in the same way, we do not consider the tragic and terrible new flare-up of aggression towards the Palestinian proletarians to be an isolated event.
Now more than ever, in the light of the historical experiences of our class in every corner of the world since the First World War, the attitude towards war has become a borderline and fracture between those who (like the reformist and pseudo-revolutionary reformists of every socialist-like, nationalist and religious colour) intend sacrificing the life and future of us proletarians in the name of and on behalf of the survival of the capitalist mode of production (embodied in the lies of Fatherlands, of Peoples and of National States) and the internationalist revolutionary forces, who work and organize our class to fight it, overthrow it and move beyond it.
Today again, those who support one warmonger or the other in power show their faces, invoking a presumed “right to self defence” for one “national community” or the other, losing themselves in presumed “pragmatic analyses” or “geopolitics…”, and thus avoiding coming face to face with the issue and nature of the imperialist war, its causes, objectives and effects. Not only do they conceal the function of an imperialist war as an expression of the capitalist crisis, but above all they are accomplices of those States which, when faced with war and its preparation, try, in the name of “national unity”, to suffocate any form of resistence or social and economic struggle.
Again in the light of historical experience, it becomes evident that the different national factions into which the bourgeoisie organizes itself to try and overcome the crisis in which it finds itself, can only make the conditions of its rule more authoritarian, corporative, openly fascist.
Both in the big cities and on the outskirts of the capitalist world, the only bourgeois solution to the crisis of over-production is a constant worsening of wage workers’ living and working conditions: permanent and growing losses in real wages aggravated by fast spreading inflation; more intense exploitation of our work force through “greater individual productivity”, aggravated by digitalization, by longer working hours and a faster pace of work; limitation of the right to strike and demonstrate; intensification of administrative, legal and police repression… all manoeuvres that prepare the war economy and national unity for war.
Stop the slaughter, the ethnic cleansing in Palestine, Ukraine and the world!
War on war!
Organization everywhere for a radical class struggle against the State of Capital, its institutions and all its parties!
Organization of the struggle to defend living and working conditions, to strike a hard blow at the bourgeoisie’s economic and political interests!
Refusal to accept economic and social sacrifices in the name of the national economy!
An open break with social peace and a determined return to the methods and objectives of the class struggle, the only real and practicable internationalist solidarity for us proletarians, both in the metropolises and in in the imperialist outskirts!
Refusal of any partisan complicity (nationalist, religious, patriotic, mercenary, humanitarian, socialist-like, pacifist...) in favour of any one State or front of States involved in the wars!
Economic and social strike action leading to real general strikes, in order to paralyze the life of the nation and open the way for political strikes, for slowing down and preventing any mobilisation and war propaganda!
With these firm principles (and in the course of battles that it will be forced to fight) our class, the immense body of those who have no alternative for maintaining themselves but to sell their labour, will be able to reclaim independence in the fight against its historical enemy, the bourgeoisie and the intellectualoid and parasitic half classes that support it, against their State and their institutions.
But not unless the militant avant-gardes of our class get organized along the lines of these contents (and not only on the necessary but limited terrain of unions, environmental and social etc. issues), attaining and strengthening the party of the communist revolution, will it be possible to prepare for new actions of anti-militarism and anti-patriotic defeatism.
Letting your own State and its allies be defeated, disobeying the military hierarchy in an organized manner, fraternizing with our class brothers (also trapped in their own “fatherlands”), holding on tightly to arms and armed systems to defend ourselves in the first place and then free ourselves from the tentacles of the bourgeois institutions: transforming the war between States into a war within States, civil war, revolutionary war.
9/1/2024