Faced with the bloody attacks in Brussels and the ruinous, more or less local wars that have been dragging on for years now with hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions of refugees (Libya, Syria, Iraq…); faced with the unspeakable suffering of enormous masses of proletarians or those undergoing proletarianization, driven here and there like beasts to the slaughter, to the highest bidder, very little can be added to what we have already argued, said, written and published over the decades.

All we can do is repeat that, eithera revolutionary force will make its return onto the international scene, backed by solid theory and organization, the heritage of a long tradition of open struggle against reformism, opportunism and revisionism of every sort, rooted in the proletarian class and thus capable of leading it out of all the various, disastrous blind allies of all varieties of nationalism, lay or religious, right- or left-wing – in a word, either we work at reinforcing the international communist party as we always have done, a minority sailing against the wind - or else the decay in this society based on profit and capitalism, everlasting competition, increasingly profound and more frequent economic crises, the “war of all against all”, will merely bring us even bloodier conflicts, waged with the most sophisticated and merciless weapons of mass destruction, right up to the terrible, supreme obscenity of a third world war between imperialist marauders. We can’t delude ourselves for much longer: there is no other way. And nothing more to add.

  International Communist Party

Foreword

We have insisted more than once that, if the evolution of trade unions in the modern, imperialist phase has transformed traditional union structure into an authentic organ for the economic and social control of the proletariat, this certainly does not mean that the need for economic defence has disappeared, or, indeed, the radical, potential antagonism of the proletariat towards capital. The advance of the economic crisis itself, the contradictions it opens up and the consequent social issues inevitably drive workers in all imperialist States onto this battleground and will oblige them to equip themselves once more with new stable defence structures, an authentic class organisation. And it will also be one of the battlegrounds for the clash between communists and the variegated front of the bourgeois reformist enemy (see: our publication For the Uncompromising Defence of the Living and Working Conditions of Proletarians – Forms of organization and methods and objectives of struggles). This, to put it very briefly, is the path that will involve the whole of our class once again taking up the battle on a purely trade-union and social basis: a path that not only is not linear, and never will be, but one which feeds, and will increasingly feed, on transitory organizational experiences – a little like an accumulation of potential energy before an explosion.