Some may turn up their noses at this title – those who still believe in the intrinsic good of “things as they are.” But they should take a look around them: in Bangladesh, in the collapse of a monstrous building housing numerous clothes factories (clothes that are “in fashion” in any western country), one thousand two hundred proletarians, women and men, exploited and underpaid, die, chained to the production line by a single mode of production in its merciless quest for profit; in Syria, day after day, the butchering of proletarian and proletarianized masses continues in a war that all the leading imperialisms are involved and equally interested in, where they all earn profits from the legal and illegal sales of arms of every sort. Must we go on with the list of daily massacre, with a count of violent deaths - in every clime and in every form - that brings goose pimples to the flesh?
The military wars between imperialist thieves with their bands of mercenaries assembled on both sides; the war of Capital against the proletariat, its working and living conditions, its very existence, with the deaths in the workplace, the progressive poisoning, the daily exhaustion of men, women and children for the extraction of plus value; the “low intensity” wars, the fruit of individual and collective suffering, of madness and frustration, the unhealthy obsession with being on top (domestic violence against women and kids, mass killings in schools or in the streets, the homicidal neglect that follows when the elderly and the sick are pushed aside, those who are no longer of use to the production process) … Not to mention the environmental disaster: this, too, is a war carried out with every weapon imaginable. What is all this if not widespread destruction, against which only the obtuse insensitivity produced by political and religious narcotics prevents a rebellion?
Yes, capitalism is the system of widespread destruction. And this is certainly not a novelty: it is sufficient to open Marx’s Capital (to read it and assimilate it as a weapon of criticism and of combat) for a blood-chilling demonstration of this impregnable reality, over a span of over two centuries of bourgeois rule. And now, behind this destruction, another, even more devastating is being prepared.
For some time now, vast stretches of the world have become critical areas: the Maghreb-Mashrek strip of territory, from Tunisia to the Middle East, right up to Iran; the part connecting Afghanistan to the Indo-Chinese peninsula, right through India; the coasts on opposite sides of the Sea of Japan, the Yellow Sea and the East China Sea; the sub-Saharan and Central African strip. For years now, either regional wars have been going on here, in which all the imperialist powers are more or less directly involved, or tension and friction have been building up which could soon lead to breaking point in the fragile and unstable balance. This is the heritage of two world wars with the planet being re-designed by the belligerent and victorious powers; it is the heritage of a capitalism that has reached its imperialist phase – i.e. the one in which the destruction, aggression and violence inherent in this mode of production since its very beginnings manifest themselves to the highest degree (should we recall the genocide of the Irish, the Indians, the Africans, the Native Americans?).
We communists do not demonize capitalism – we have acknowledged its historical merits during the obligatory passage from the Middle Ages to the so-called “modern age”. But we remember, and demonstrate with figures at hand, that its agony (because this is what it is: not labour pains but the torment of the end) is destined to cause everything to decay: in the economy, in society, in material life and culture. What is coming, as the economic crisis spreads and worsens (a crisis of surplus production of goods and capitals, thus inherent in the nature of capitalism), is one more stage in this widespread destruction. What is coming is a new world conflict: no longer regional, no longer limited to some far-off area from which we just receive the figures (the macabre bulletin) of those who have died in bombings, attacks, machine-gunnings, gassings, shootings, mass murders and so on, in the exquisite case histories of destruction techniques invented by the capitalist arms industry – the only one to really “hold out” in times of crisis. A new slaughter, which will again have as its main victim the proletariat – as in the First and Second World Wars. And so there will be a transition from widespread destruction to total destruction – in the hope, afterwards (if the destruction has not overstepped the upper limit for the survival of the human race), of rebuilding and, through rebuilding, to generate business opportunities – just as it was after the Second Word War.
The proletariat, all over the world, must get ready for this. It is the only force capable of preventing a third world slaughter. It must get ready by starting once again to fight in order to defend itself from enemy attacks and, thanks to these struggles to defend itself, learn to get organized to attack the enemy and overthrow it – before it is too late. Our task as communists is to direct these struggles from the (indispensable) level of defence to that of attack (when objective and subjective conditions are mature for this).
What is more, there is an urgent need for the real sense and practice of revolutionary defeatism to spread amongst avant-garde proletarians. Today this means: opposing any economic and social blackmail by Capital and its State and by political parties and “institutional unions” who are its tools and its pillars; refusing any demand for sacrifices in the name of the “superior needs of the national economy”; not giving in to the illusion that Capital’s State is “Everyone’s State”, fighting openly, without any uncertainty or mercy, against all attempts to break the class front according to racial or national divides; preparing to boycott any war efforts by the national bourgeoisie and refusing to mobilize to defend the Nation as the “superior good” to be defended against “the enemy”; resisting any temptation to joint one war front or the other as the various pacifists and fake, one-track “anti-imperialists” will, inevitably, encourage us to at the given moment.
Not on one side or the other but on our own side – on the side of our own immediate and historical interests: this must be task assigned to the world proletariat in the day-to-day battles it fights and when faced with the storms that are gathering. We communists fight, day by day, to make this task into a decisive and final victory, the flag around which proletarians will assemble to move into the attack.
International Communist Party