What is happening in Greece is not a remote and isolated incident. It is one more chapter in the now long and devastating economic crisis that began in the mid ‘70s and is destined to become even deeper, with increasingly serious effects on the proletariat in all countries. Arising in production, and not in the world of finance as they would like us to believe, it is a systemic crisis of the capitalist mode of production: it is a crisis of overproduction of goods and capital, which the bourgeoisie can only approach by striking at the proletariat and squeezing the most out of them – with tighter and tighter crunches in terms of living and working conditions and, lastly, when this is no longer sufficient and the situation of inter-imperialist contrasts (mors tua, vita mea) demands it, dispatching them to massacre one another on opposing sides in a new world bloodbath.
Proletarians, beware! The pitiless measures that the Greek Government is taking in response to the diktats of the ECB and the IMF are measures that any government in these same conditions will take in order to try and exit the crisis. “Blood and tears!” promises the Greek bourgeoisie, abandoning for once the language of rhetoric and metaphysics and becoming realist, even materialist: bread for bread and wine for wine! “Blood and tears!” will be promised and imposed by bourgeoisies all over the world, when the subsequent chapters of the crisis begin (and they are already getting underway: as bourgeois experts themselves admit, not even exactly between the lines, acknowledging that they … don’t know which saint to invoke next!). And blood and tears it will be.
Proletarians, beware! Amongst the many risks that are accumulating in this situation of flux, which can change from one day to another and accelerate at amazing speed from one day to another, there is one which is extremely serious. This is the danger of nationalism. In fact, the bourgeoisie is not satisfied by merely deviating the instinctive anger of the proletarians, already squeezed to the utmost and under increasing threat, by setting them against one straw figure or the other: the individual dishonest banker, the vampire-banks, the real estate agencies, the rating agencies and so on. It has to start filling the air we breathe with the poison of nationalism, of chauvinism. In Greece this can already be glimpsed: “the bad guys are the ones who, by means of their interested aid (paid for at a high rate of interest), wish to strangle the country; and the most evil of all of them is Germany, who has blackmailed us for a long time, imposing sanctions, who wants to ‘colonize’ us!”. Arguments like this are becoming increasingly widespread and intense with the passing of time, as the crisis broadens and deepens: each human being against the next, because the realm of capital is the realm of the war of all against all! This is the first, great danger that proletarians must be alert to.
The guilty party is not one individual or the other, one agency or institution or another, one country or another: the cause of the disaster, of the imminent catastrophe and collapse, with all the suffering that will follow and hit the proletariat all over the world, lies in a mode of production which, after having abundantly exhausted its own life cycle, is now on its deathbed, suffocating and killing the whole world in its death throes. This is the guilty party to be overthrown once and for all, this is the cause of all our ills, which must be completely and definitively uprooted.
Greece is the world! Proletarians, be aware of this before it is too late! The Greek bourgeoisie has launched a true war cry and this war cry will be echoing everywhere in the near future, launched by all the national bourgeoisies. Fine.Let’s take it up and reply with our own war cry, the war cry that generations upon generations of proletarians have launched and fought for with fortitude and generosity:
Not one sacrifice for capital! unrelenting defence of our living and working conditions! the refusal of all blackmail in the name of saving the national economy! extension, organization and direction of our battles, with the creation of a single proletarian front! real, effective international solidarity, on the understanding that the attack on the proletariat is carried out by all bourgeoisies, always – even when ready to tear one another to bits – allied in any case against us! a blow by blow response to any attack by capital, by its state, by its legal and illegal cops! an open class war against capital, its state and its governments, under whatever guise, in the inevitable perspective of the supreme clash, class against class, to seize power under the guidance of the international communist party and to set up the dictatorship of the proletariat, the necessary bridge towards a classless society, towards communism!
International Communist Party
(Internationalist Papers - Cahiers Internationalistes - Il Programma Comunista)
