No need for many words: only the pathetically deluded fail to see that, in the depths of the capitalist economy, with the peaks and dips in its decades-long crisis, a new and widespread conflict is being prepared - one even more devastating than the two past world wars and the countless “minor wars” that preceded and followed them: the last of the series, the war in Ukraine, and the slaughter of the Palestinian proletarians in and around Gaza.
Imperialist wars are not the result of the “will for power” or “homicidal madness” of one “dictator” or the other or - worse still - of one more or less “chosen people” or another. They are produced by the very dynamics of capital, obliged to have recourse to them in the vain attempt to make the blocked mechanism of accumulation move forward again, by destroying what has been produced in excess, including the labour force. In the age of imperialism, there are no “aggressor” countries or “attacked” countries, “rogue countries” or “friendly countries”: it is the various national bourgeoisies that are attacking one another, continuing - with increasingly merciless and extreme means - the “peaceful” competition (see: trade wars!) on which the capitalist mode of production is based. Two world wars and dozens of bloody “minor” conflicts should have served to teach us this! Faced with the coming conflict now under preparation, not a single proletarian, man or woman, at the service of the ruling classes, their States and their armies!
“Fatherlands”, “nations”, “religions” can be left to the bourgeoisie and their faithful petit-bourgeois servants. We have no “fatherlands” or “nations” to defend or religions to promote: our war can only be the class war, to finally win power and bring into being a classless society, with no exploiters and no-one exploited. And so let us organize ourselves, starting from today, to break national unity and oppose the war-mongering politics of all governments! We vigorously repeat the slogan of revolutionary defeatism and proletarian brotherhood before and beyond any barrier or frontier, filling it out with operational content:
An open fight to defend living and working conditions, striking hard at the economic and political interests of the bourgeoisie.
The refusal to accept economic and social sacrifices in the name of the national economy.
An open break with the social pact and a determined return to the methods and objectives of the class war, the only real and feasible internationalist solidarity, in the imperialist metropolises as well as in the peripheries.
The refusal to take sides (nationalist, religious, mercenary, humanitarian, pseudo-socialist, pacifist…) on behalf of any State or fronts of States involved in wars.
Economic and social strikes leading to authentic general strikes, paralyzing the life of the nation and opening the way to political strikes, aiming to slow down and prevent any military mobilization or war propaganda.
Not unless the militant avant-garde of our class organizes around these contents (and not only on the necessary but limited ground of union, environmental and social action etc…) will it be possible to prepare for acts of open anti-militarism and anti-patriotic defeatism:
Allowing our own State and its allies to be defeated, disobeying military hierarchies in an organized manner, fraternizing with our class brothers (also trapped in their “fatherlands”), keeping a firm hold on all arms and defence systems, to defend ourselves in first place and then free ourselves from the tentacles of bourgeois institutions: transforming the war between States into a war within States, civil war, revolutionary war.
