The proliferation and intensification of the conflicts between imperialisms in areas such as the Middle and Far East, Africa and Europe itself (we won’t repeat once again the list of explosive situations or those already in flames) are sparking off repercussions on all levels. “Public discourse” (or ideological mobilisation) related to the need for “European rearmament” is stepping up, since – as Charles Michel, President of the European Council has recently had reason to declare – “if we want peace, we must prepare for war.” Words and expressions like “escalation”, “war economy”, “defending our trade routes”, when referring to specific episodes such as the war in Ukraine or the tense situation in the Red Sea, are more and more frequently heard, so that the fatigued ears of Holy Public Opinion can gradually get used to them. Moreover, more in detail, the prospect of an approaching third world war (the inevitable outlet for this mode of production and its profound crisis of over-production since the conclusion of the cycle of expansion following the end of the second world war) brings dangerously to the surface the contradictions implicit in all positions that fail to identify with revolutionary Marxism or – worse still! – proclaim they do, only to betray it by their actions.
The ideological preparation for initially imperialist and later inter-imperialist warfare also comprises slogans and strategic-tactical trends which are in fact the prelude and allusion to a total abandonment of class and internationalist orientation. The interminable Special Military Operation in Ukraine, which sees NATO and Russia on opposing sides, and the umpteenth massacre by the State of Israel in the Gaza Strip (with all its percussions on immediately adjacent and further-off areas) have again raised the ghost of “national issues”. And this is what has caused the disastrous free-fall of many “leftwing” formations into the infamous trap of “national unity” under the most varied of pretexts, making the most contorted efforts to scale the slippery (and bloody, with proletarian blood!) slope of social-chauvinism.
We, on the contrary, say that the proletariat must no longer help carry the burden of residual nationalisms, under the delusion that “carried forward democratically to its logical conclusion”, they may become the launching pad for the socialist revolution (the Northern-Irish/Basque/Catalan/Slav/Palestinian/Kurdish/Chechen/Ukrainian, etc. issues). These, on the contrary, are authentically cancerogenous residues, toxic and potentially lethal. There are no longer “oppressed peoples or bougeosies” from other historical phases to support in their “right to self determination” or “separation”, in order to accelerate the progress of the proletarian revolution: both quantitavely and qualitatively, the problem is now out of time and out of place.
This doesn’t mean that petit-bourgeois uprisings cannot set off timid, more or less violent and contingent struggles, due to locally created contradictions, in the course of inevitable occupations and operations during warfare. But the causes are to be found elsewhere. The cause of the first world conflict was not to be found in the Balkans, with their tangle of fictitious ethnic entities; and nor was the second caused by uncertain borders between Italy, Poland, France, Chechenia, Austria, but by far more complex, destructive forces that had accumulated in the caveaux of the imperialist powers. Since then, the putrefaction of a society based on profit and exploitation, on reaching its highest point, has merely continued full speed ahead, building up explosive tension on the one hand and on the other fuelling the most infamous recovery of counterrevolutionary positions. And over the span of the past few decades, it has never ceased to cause the most dramatic massacres of proletarians all over the world: in particular, clearly, in the Middle East, where the Palestinian proletariat has continued to be the hostage and sacrificial victim of imperialist interests in the area, surrounded by the cynical and instrumental indifference of all the bourgeoisies, Arab (including Palestinian) first and foremost.
The proletarian dead have no fatherland. We must work so that the living and struggling proletarians proclaim and claim decidedly that they have no fatherland, and act consequently! We repeat: the cycle of the national and anti-colonialist revolutions has been over for fifty years now. To keep it alive by brandishing residual or inexistent cases of “national self determination” or “national claims” as bridges towards the “socialist revolution” (!), superimposing “class wars and national wars” (!), “wars of liberation”, or of “resistence to the oppressor”, means precipitating into the grimmest betrayal of our class’s preparation for the proletarian and communist revolution. It means travelling once again the path of Menshevism – that Menshevism which, with all its offshoots (Maoism, third-worldism, common-frontism, campism, etc.), goes by the name of Stalinism.
For our militants, our sympathizers and avid readers and above all for future generations of proletarians, what remains unchanged is the task of handing down an internationalism that is not proclaimed but practised, the central component of the communist programme, a prospect to be practised, organised, directed in the here and now. An internationalism that is not a generic and humanitarian “appeal to peoples and to human beings of good will” but hard work, combative and combatting, to restore the revolutionary organ, pulverised by the most obscene of counter-revolutions which, by weaving together democracy, Nazi-fascism and Stalinism, has ever struck the proletarian and communist movement in all its history. We do not have “fatherlands” or “nations” to conquer, defend or support, or to mobilise for: we have before us the duty (not moral but historical) to launch and guide our proletarian class (which is starting to struggle, albeit in a disorderly manner, beneath the pressure of the economic crises, state repression, slaughters on all battelefronts, led by the various ferociously warring imperialisms) along the path that leads it far from them and above all against them. The sirens that wish, instead, to delay it and delude it that there are short-cuts, abbreviations, alternative roads of all varieties, anything to avoid the difficult classist and internationalist path, must be fought against as class enemies.
Faced with these bloody events, with the immense suffering of our oppressed class brothers, massacred, chased from one place to another, hunted by wars, hunger, poverty, famine, which are the rotten fruit of a mode of production that is now merely destructive, it becomes increasingly clear that there is a need to strengthen and establish solid international roots for the revolutionary party. This means a stable, political organisation founded on theoretical-political and tactical-strategic positions and the fruit of profound analyses with long experience of militancy, able to link all these elements and lead them back to their deepest root: the survivial of capitalism; and thus indicate the prospect of the communist revolution, its real substance, and the path, albeit complex and difficult, to attain it.
This “long job” implies the urgency to reaffirm (once again: not in words but in facts) revolutionary defeatism and fraternity between proletarians on all fronts, without which the appeal to internationalism would prove void of content and pure farce. In this case, too, we have never stopped at launching a slogan but indicated the need for the necessary progression:
Let’s stop the massacres, the ethnic cleansing in Palestine, in Ukraine and throughout the world!
War on war!
Let’s get organised everywhere for a radical class struggle against the State of capital, its institutions and all its parties!
Let’s organise the fight for the defence of living and working conditions, to strike a hard blow at the economic and political interests of the bourgeoisie.
Refusal to accept economic and social sacrifices in the name of the national economy.
An open break with the social pact and a decided return to the methods and objectives of the class war, the only real and feasible internationalist solidarity we proletarians have, both in big cities and in the imperialist outposts.
Refusal of any partisan complicity (nationalist, religious, patriotic, mercenary, humanitarian, pseudo-socialist, pacifist…) with any State or front of States involved in the wars.
Economic and social strikes leading to authentic general strikes to parlayse the life of the nation and open the path to political strikes, in order to slow down and prevent any mobilisation or propaganda for war.
Not unless the avant-garde of our class organises around these contents (and not only in the necessary but limited areas of union work, the environment, social issues etc.) and joins and strengthens the party of the communist revolution, will it be possible to prepare openly anti-militarist and anti-patriotic defeatism:
Allow our own State and its allies to be defeated, disobey the military hierarchies in an organised manner, fraternise with our class brothers (also trapped in their own “fatherlands”), keep a firm hold on the arms and arms systems to first defend and then free ourselves from the tentacles of bourgeois institutions: transform the war between States into one within States, civil war, revolutionary war.
The mere facts of present capitalist reality themselves scream the urgency for this job to be done and the need for this perspective.
2//3/2024
