Russia’s unleashing of its “special military operation” against Ukraine in February 2022 has seen the return of imperialist war to the sub-continental European stage.
The crisis born of the overproduction of capital, goods and (alas!) proletarians magnifies the irreconcilable contradiction between the forces of production and the forms in which the capitalist mode of production organizes them.
The chickens have come home to roost. Our class has been stifled and drugged up to the eyeballs by over 50 years of reformism, nationalism and religious or scientistic idealism – under the artfully concocted guise of representative democracy and Fascism. While it is still striving to react and take back control of the modes, methods and objectives of the class struggle, our historical enemy – the impersonal bourgeois class – reacts as best and as knowingly as it can. Organized within the confines of its Nation States, it seeks to obstruct the interrupted process of capital valorisation by means of economic measures. Leaving aside the technical-scientific glorification of productivity, such measures ultimately amount to nothing more than greater exploitation and – during this phase of imperialistic putrescence – an exaltation of anything that seems to increase mass profits and the circulation of money. Outside its Nation State confines, meanwhile, the bourgeois class intensifies its search for new markets and the apportionment of the old. In the by now concluded phase of economic expansion, the conflict (which, in those areas most recently subject to capitalist development, had always consisted of violent rule, as the tragic epic of decolonization has borne out) could be played out according to the balanced commercial, diplomatic and cultural forms established by the powers-that-be in the aftermath of “World War II”. But the beginning of the cycle of crises has led to a rethink.
The alliances and contrapositions imposed by the victors have helped maintain all the sections of our class under military threat. They have also sought to disguise and contain the inexorable law of capitalism’s disordered and unequal development with paradoxical results. The alliances imposed by the United States of America (NATO and SEATO) emerged as instruments of control and servitude, while the end of the so called Cold War between the two most important military powers exposed the imperialist fragility of Stalinist and post-Stalinist Russia (rendered all the more evident by the pulverization of the Warsaw Pact and the collapse of COMECON, whose states slowly yet surely turned out to be an expansion of western states precisely during the “cold war” period), just as our party had seen when analysing its socio-economic nature in relation to the development of capitalism in the age of imperialism. All this while the People’s Republic of China became completely modernized and can no longer be contained in its albeit huge domestic market...
The conflict still bears all the marks of imperialist war (direct or indirect conflict, more or less internationalized in nature, between States wishing to maintain or expand a controlling area of raw materials – and proletarian/proletarianised masses –, and exportation of goods and capitals), yet could potentially be transformed into an out-and-out inter-imperialist war (a conflict among opposing imperialist fronts seeking to secure their slice of the entire world market pie).
However, power is one thing, action another.
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As events hasten along, chickens also come home to roost among the ranks of political groups wishing to represent the interests of the proletariat.
Bobbing and weaving between openly declared warmongering and increasingly active and operative pacifism, the illusion of unity and national interest is given fresh lifeblood with every new guise adopted by classic bourgeois reformism. Meanwhile, to reawaken internationalism and proletarian opposition to capitalist wars, (in)voluntary and immediatist opportunism stokes the fires of the activist illusion that the moment is ripe for invitations to meetings and conferences where appeals to clear-as-dishwater “internationalist forces in the world” may be made.
As of today, our party has received three such invitations. All were declined with pithy political motivations that summarise just how much we learned from the experience of participating in the life of our class – in its being a class in itself – during the restoration of the revolutionary class organ.
As we have stated, our class is still dominated by bourgeois rule in the unity of the nation. And, precisely, as Marx expertly declared (“the working class is revolutionary or it is nothing”), it is nothing as yet. The task now awaiting the most combative working men and women is to unite in that organization which, in and by means of the struggles, will reveal the class unto itself and prepare it for that revolutionary process that will take it from the nothing of today and force it to become everything.
The communist Party is not some impromptu movement ad libbing tactics off the cuff. Among its established objectives is that of snatching the proletariat from the jaws of national unity.
The escalation of conflicts hardly comes as a surprise. And it obliges us to continue, with ever greater determination and on all occasions, the political praxis which has as its main aim that of breaking the curse of the national interest, of the Fatherland’s unity, of the State.
Against the wars of Capital, the wars between States and State fronts, and the war waged by the bourgeoisie against the proletariat and nature, we must be prepared. We must fight long before the conflicts erupt. All the declarations and highfalutin appeals stemming from what can only be shady backroom deals, amount to nothing more than counterproductive scholarly rhetoric if the nuts and bolts of revolutionary class preparation are missing.
The way to oppose the war of Capital begins with the fight against the peace of Capital. Each stage of the class struggle is well mapped, as indeed is the final destination: the development of proletarian defeatism enables the war between States to be transformed into a civil and social war inside States, thereby setting off the process of the communist revolution and the establishment of the proletariat as ruling class.
So the Party has no appeals to make to other organizations.
The Party calls on those in the vanguard of the proletarian struggles to continue, intensify and scale up those defensive economic and social battles already under way. It is always on the lookout to organize these struggles better, both inside and outside existing organizations, while always opposing their present leadership and their predisposition towards unity and common interests with the State.
The Party addresses itself to proletarians and those who can no longer abide the disastrous and devastating rule of the bourgeoisie; and to those who are convinced, in heart and mind, they must fight – steadily and methodically – the democratic dictatorship of Capital, against all the institutions, parties and trade unions of all the States, each more imperialist than the other.
The Party operates among the ranks of its (our) class to advance every possible opportunity of:
1. Organization of the battle to defend living and working conditions, so as to hit the bourgeoisie’s economic and political interests hard
2. Refusal to accept economic and social sacrifices in the name of the “national economy”
3. Open break with the social pact and an unwavering return to the methods and objectives of the class struggle, the only real and practicable internationalist solidarity of the proletariat, both in the metropolises of imperialism and in its peripheries.
4. Refusal to take sides (nationalist, religious, patriotic, mercenary, humanitarian, socialistic, pacifist...) in favour of any of the States, or State fronts, involved in wars.
5. Economic and social strike actions that lead to outright general strikes to paralyse national life and pave the way for political strikes against any type of pro-war mobilisation or propaganda.
Only by adhering to these mainstay practises can preparations be undertaken to turn back the poverty, pain and sorrow that afflicts most of our class. A class which has been sacrificed on the front and back lines of battle in the name of “fatherlands” that are nothing more than crime rings bent on perpetuating capitalistic profiteering – an exploitation that for over two hundred years has undermined the living conditions of our species and the natural world we are part of.
Only by repossessing these mainstays (and during the course of battles that it is and will be obliged to wage) will our class – that huge mass of people whose very existence depends on their being able to sell their labour power – acquire once again an autonomy of struggle against the bourgeoisie – its old enemy – and all the half classes of eggheads and parasites that support it, their State and their institutions.
But only if those in the vanguard of our class battle and any eventual “traitors of the ruling classes” succeed in organizing themselves around these issues, (without forgetting the more limited – albeit required – social, economic, environmental issues...), reaching out and strengthening the revolutionary communist party, only then will it be possible to lay the ground for openly anti-patriotic defeatism and anti-militarism. That means letting one’s own State and its allies be defeated, disobeying military hierarchies, deserting and fraternizing with our class brothers (trapped inside their own respective “fatherlands”) and holding tight to our weapons and weapon systems, in self defence first of all, and then to free ourselves from the grasping tentacles of the bourgeoisie and its institutions.
The Party is always and forever ready to fight; just as it always and forever keeps at arm’s length the empty tittle-tattle of last minute analysts, the acolytes of the latest sociological trends, those allergic to the discipline required for the anonymous and collective work behind revolutionary preparation and those hell bent on the pursuit of easy success. Not to mention the gifted authors of “invitations” and “appeals”.
January 2023