Amongst partisans and loyalists, nationalists and mercenaries, all provided with arms by their imperialist instigators, the planned murder of proletarians takes place in perfect text-book style. Today is the turn of the Syrians. Let the proletariat launch its defeatist slogan: “The enemy in any country is the bourgeoisie! It must be overthrown."
“The partisan is someone who fights for someone else, whether out of conviction, duty or for money is of little importance. The militant of a revolutionary party is a worker who is fighting for himself and the class he belongs to. The destiny of revolutionary revival depends on the ability to raise a new and insurmountable barrier between the method of the party’s class action and the democratic-bourgeois method of the partisan struggle”.
(from our text “Marxismo o partigianesimo”, Battaglia comunista, n°14, 1949)
As communists and internationalists, we know by heart and from the science of history that in the age of imperialism class dominion and oppression extends and intensifies. The economic crises that follow one upon the other leave scattered behind them growing poverty and a backwash of death amongst proletarians all over the world. War is the natural habitat of capitalism: indeed, imperialism means growing international competition, keen trade wars, the export of capitals which inevitably enter into conflict with each other, the control over sources of raw materials and their transport routes and thus attempts to exclude competitors, right up to the unbridled outbreak of conflicts, first locally and then, in perspective and given favourable and necessary material conditions, worldwide. This is what has been happening for decades from the Balkan area, through the Middle East (Iraq and the Palestinian Territories) up to Afghanistan and Pakistan, the crossroads of more or less approved or legal trade (arms and drugs), vital trade corridors, oil and gas pipelines, oil fields and sources of water.
For months, after having swept through Libya and Mali (and a few years earlier Nigeria, Sudan and Central Africa), multinational imperialism has been laying waste to Syria and massacring the poor and the deprived, the proletarians and the proletarianized. It is a multi-centre attack that again reflects and represents the English, French, American, Russian colonialist divisions and mandates, joined now by recent Chinese ambitions and less recent Israeli ones, which reach as far as Iran. States invented ex-novo and subordinate from their constitution onwards to old colonial centres (Jordan, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria) are again in the sights of the great powers, obliged to confront one another by the pressure of the devastating crisis in which we are all immersed. The international mandate of the UN, which has allowed the death of thousands of Slav, Iraqi, Afghan proletarians, is the agreement that permits these brigands to attack Syria today and even more in the future. In the ideological imperialist fervour, the appeal for so-called “peace”, the condemnation of the “dictatorship” of one puppet or another, the lament for the absence of the wraith “democracy”, the rejoicing for the presence of “liberators”, loyalists and mercenaries on all sides, with the addition of various Jihadists and “brothers in faith”, are all accompanied by the far more real and lethal designs of the great arms dealers, in perfect mutual agreement, directly or indirectly dispatched by the company Anonymous Capital Ltd., engaged in destroying the overproduction of goods.
As communists and internationalists, our slogans can only be those of revolutionary defeatism against the bourgeoisie of all nations, large and small, already organized in states or still subordinate, attacked or attackers:
- * The refusal of any military action (in whatever guise: humanitarian, democratic, bearer of civilization) by “our” national bourgeoisie.
- The refusal to accept economic and social sacrifices in the name of the “country’s economy”.
- * Organization of the fight to defend the living and working conditions of the proletariat, as an obligatory phase in dealing a hard blow to the war efforts of the bourgeoisie.
- * A decisive return to the methods and objectives of the class struggle, breaking with any logic of cooperation or social pact – methods and objectives that for now represent the only real internationalist solidarity by proletarians in imperialist capitals towards the oppressed proletarian masses.
- * Refusal of any partisan spirit (nationalist, patriotic, mercenary, humanitarian, pacifist) in favour of one “front” or another.
Only on the basis of these basic premises, implying independent action by the proletariat, will it be possible to organize open revolutionary defeatism at the centre of the class strategy, thus making it possible to break down the war front.
In this commitment to the struggle, who are our allies? They are proletarians all over the world and in particular those in countries massacred by imperialist wars. They are not and never will be any bourgeois faction, whatever it may be, however armed or “resistant”, in whatever guise, lay or religious, reformist or – even worse – pseudo-socialist.
The profound economic crisis and armed attacks that have followed on one other over the past few decades demonstrate that the capitalist mode of production has come to the end of its road, that its protracted death throes are merely destructive and that the time has therefore come to put it out of its misery. Through the violent seizing of power and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat directed by the communist party, will it at last be possible to set up a classless society – communism. Thus, the real conquest of the present is the rebirth, extension and firm establishment of the world communist party.
International Communist Party