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The bloodless annexation of the Crimea and the so-called “war of liberation” of the Ukraine’s supporters of independence on Russia’s borders has for months occupied the East European stage. Once again the European continent is agitated by the spectacles of old and new nationalisms destined to multiply – nationalisms which will never cease to put on a show of muscle power until the terrain they grow out of, the national States, has been removed. Against them, the international and internationalist battle cry lives on: “Proletarians of the world, unite!”

The new year is opening with further, serious tremors in the capitalist mode of production: an unstoppable fall in oil prices and the prices of raw materials, giddy swings in the rates of international currencies, endless instability in Greece, the difficulties of the Russian economy, slowdowns on those of China and Germany, the plunge on the world stock markets, deflation advancing everywhere, unemployment spreading in peaks and dips. The trade war is becoming increasingly frenzied, the clashes between imperialist powers more decided and, from the United States to France, from Italy to Germany, social disintegration is extending.

In the communist tradition there is deep-rooted opposition to nationalism and militarism, to any form of “warmongering” based on working-class support for the bourgeois State, either in the name of “defence against aggressors” or of “saving liberal and democratic civilization”. But a no less deep-rooted tradition is that of out-and-out opposition to pacifism – a concept and a programme in itself vague and undefined, but a lethal weapon against the proletariat when it falls into the hands of the various gangs of opportunists, whether of the older or newer variety, who make use of it to spread confusion and illusion in the proletarian ranks with fixed ideas of interclass relations and anti-imperialism based on peace marches, sit-ins and flash mobs of all these “sincere democrats”.

After more than 50 days of bombing and over 2000 deaths, including women and children, the Israeli attack unleashed on Gaza’s proletariat over the past few months has temporarily ceased. The Palestinian National Authority (PNA) has reassumed its role as controller, according to the security agreements stipulated in Oslo in 1993 with the Israeli attacker-occupiers. Villages, enclaves, shelters, refugee camps, West Bank towns in area A (18% of the territory, the administrative area governed by the Palestinian National Authority), area B (21%, the area where civil administration is the responsibility of the Palestinians and security that of the Israelis) and area C (controlled exclusively by Israel) thus return to so-called normality.