In the metropolises of the States of older capitalism as well as in those of younger capitalism and in the peripheries of the whole capitalist world, the economic, living and working conditions of wage workers (and, subordinately, of the declining half classes and the proletarianized masses) continue to worsen, with generalized and constant increases in the cost of basic necessities, including housing, gas and electricity.
Everywhere, the restructuring of economic enterprises (multinationals, individually- or family-owned, cooperatives, state-owned, nationalized or of any other "business name"), induced by the irrepressible crisis of overproduction, generates more and more unemployment and precarious workers, and increasingly forces women back into the home, in underpaid work for the family, together with a more and more unsustainable increase in working hours and pace of work – the first and only cause of the growing number of homicides, serious traumatic injuries and illnesses in the workplace.
The negligible wage increases of contract renewals (when they are renewed!) are worthless, moreover linked to so-called productivity which is nothing if not an intensification of the exploitation of the workforce.
Two years and more of a "health crisis" (at first acute but now cronic, to the cynical indifference of those who blathered that "nothing would be the same as before") then did nothing but mask and worsen the irreversibility of the crisis.
The wicked and criminal management of the "pandemic" has definitively and irreversibly demonstrated that the "well-being of citizens" is the least of the objectives of bourgeois States, unless profits are made from diseases and their management, both in the hypocritical "public" form and in the more sincere "private" form: with medicines (homeopathic and phytotherapeutic products included), with vaccines (using old or new technology), with tests and diagnostic and therapeutic devices, with the transformation of clinics, hospitals, outpatient networks in "healthcare and hospital companies" (real medical-surgical industries where, at the cost of the patients, the division of labor, precariousness and the system of contracts and subcontracts are in force, alienating and rigid), with the "residences" more or less subsidised and transformed into the sad antechambers of cemeteries, for the elderly, the chronically ill and the non self-sufficient.
Resorting to the alibi of "public health" in the social management of the emergency, with a succession of impositions ranging from the extravagant to the authoritarian, and above all by limiting and regulating more and more the "right to strike", to demonstrate and to meet in public and for the public, national States have strengthened (better than they have done to “control" so-called "terrorism", more or less of an Islamic stamp) the repressive and political control structures, to "accustom" the population (and foremost our working class lacking any further resources) to a "state of emergency and national unity" – in order to curb as far as possible, in the climate of preparation for war, any attempt at resistance, contrast, rebellion and organization antagonistic to the general dilapidation of the environment in which we live, and of our living and working conditions.
Police repression is becoming increasingly violent: beatings, thrashings, harassment, as we have already suffered in the strikes and mobilizations of recent decades; and it will be increasingly supported and sustained by judicial repression, with administrative provisions, extension of crimes of association, emergency legislation becoming routine – an expression of what the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie is preparing (has always prepared) to face and repress the social conflict that the economic crisis generates slowly but inevitably. And it does so, by historically alternating (as convenient!) the complementary forms of fascism and democracy, which only reactionaries in bad faith can pass off as "opposite".
The crisis also accelerates the warmongering dynamics typical of the capitalist mode of production. Since the end of the Second World Slaughterhouse, imperialist wars, those which serve this or that state to rob raw materials and control their flows, export capital, conquer markets, subjugate proletarian and proletarianized masses, have never ceased, even distorting the struggles of liberation from the rule of the old colonial imperialism. The so-called international organizations (UN, EU, OECD, WTO, and so on) are nothing more than "pacts between gangsters" to sanction and guarantee the division, as long as the balance of power between the concentrations of power does not change. The more the crisis deepens, and the less effective the countertendencies put in place by all the States are, the more clashes become necessary, together with new alliances. Thus the way is opened to the intra-imperialist war – the one that is approaching ever faster and of which the events in the Balkans, the Middle East, the Caucasus, ending with the gangrene of the Russian "special military operation" in Ukraine, are but cruel signs.
Every war has had, has and will continue to have its own ideological cover: the pretext to drive our class brothers trapped by bourgeois states to massacre (active and passive). But these States are and remain the collective capitalist, and their governments are merely the board of directors appointed by the assembly of shareholders that they call Parliament and as such an instrument of domination and dictatorship by the impersonal bourgeois class. Against this or that "enemy", they trap us in the cage of "National Unity", of the "Homeland" with many epithets: socialist, democratic, the "chosen people", “the common good", "guardians of civilization" – always and in any case criminal associations aimed at prosecuting the exploitation of wage labour, natural resources and the valorisation of capital.
So, as always there is plenty to do. But how and why to act?
First of all, we must clear the field of the illusory hope that the mere pressure generated by the precipitous and generalized worsening of our living and survival conditions, the depletion of scarce reserves and the erosion of reformist guarantees (or even the war itself) mechanically generate a reaction of political revolt. Our class has suffered and still suffers from the reactionary influences of decades and decades of democratic-Nazi-Fascist-Stalinist (and post-Stalinist) “reformist” measures, arising from the systematic destruction of its revolutionary organizations and fed by the crumbs laboriously snatched away by ordinary trade union struggle. Thus, there are still many reformist sirens who, with the active complicity of the official unions increasingly integrated into the State, delude the majority of our class brothers that there is still something to gain and improve, rowing with their backs bent to keep the capitalist boat make headway: electoral institutions, economic democracy, "culture", "civilization", the indistinct "interest of the people" opposed to the greedy appetites of the usual speculators, the fraud of the "welfare state", the redistribution of wealth with taxes on assets... In short, everything that still sells us our chains as gold bracelets.
The road to recovery will be painful and tiring. But there are no alternatives, because only our class, the immense group of those without further resources who are obliged to sell their labour, has the possibility and (in the making) the social and political capacity to do away with the filthy society of Capital.
The comrades of the International Communist Party invite proletarians to fight and organize – all those who can no longer bear the disastrous and devastating rule of the bourgeoisie, those who feel with their minds and hearts the need to fight the democratic dictatorship of capital methodically and consistently, against all the official institutions, the instruments, the parties and the unions of all States, one more imperialist than the other.
Organization of the struggle to defend living and working conditions, to strike hard at the economic and political interests of the bourgeoisie.
Refusal to accept economic and social sacrifices in the name of the "national economy".
Open break with social peace and a decisive return to the methods and objectives of the class struggle, the only real and practicable internationalist solidarity of us proletarians, both in the metropolises and in the imperialist peripheries.
Rejection of any accomplice partisanism (nationalist, religious, patriotic, mercenary, humanitarian, socialist, pacifist...) in favor of any of the States or fronts and alliances of the States involved in the wars.
Economic and social strike actions that lead to real general strikes to paralyze national life and pave the way for political strikes, aimed at slowing down, boycotting, impeding all mobilization and war propaganda.
Only on the basis of these practical cornerstones will it be possible to prepare to reject the misery, pain and mourning that affect the majority of our class, sacrificed on the battlefronts and in the rearguard in the name of "Homeland" which (we repeat and shall repeat again and again!) are only criminal associations with the aim of perpetuating capitalist exploitation – an exploitation that over the course of just over two centuries is undermining the conditions for the existence of our species and nature, of which we are a part.
Only by regaining possession of these practical cornerstones (and in the course of the battles that it is and will be called and forced to fight), will our class, the immense group of those who can only live on by selling their labour, be able to regain independent struggle against its historic enemy, the bourgeoisie, and the multitude of intellectual and parasitic half-classes that support it, against their State and all their institutions.
Not unless the militant avant-gardes of our class and the possible "traitors of the ruling classes" organize themselves on the basis of these contents (and not only on the terrain of the necessary but limited trade union, environmental, social, etc. action) and reach out and strengthen the party of the communist revolution, will we be able to prepare for actions of open anti-militarism and anti-patriotic defeatism: that is, allowing one's own State and its allies to be defeated, to disobey the military hierarchies in an organized manner, to desert and fraternize with our class brothers (they too trapped in their own "Homelands"), hold tight to arms and war machinery, first to defend themselves and then to free themselves from the tentacles of bourgeois institutions, of all bourgeois States, and finally transform the war between States into civil war for the international, proletarian, communist revolution.
