Against the spread of inter-imperialist wars, for the recovery of class struggle and class organization, for the strengthening and rooting of the revolutionary party!
Military interventions led by the various national bourgeoisies are growing in number and intensity, slaughtering entire populations and devastating increasingly wide areas. The economic crisis (overproduction of goods and capital) is at the bottom of these dynamics. Under increasing pressure, the national bourgeoisies are obliged to face one another, to divide and share out geopolitical areas of influence, to obtain or defend sources of raw materials, to gain control over the modern “silk roads”: oil pipelines, gas-lines, waterlines… to divide and rule. Since the end of the world’s second imperialist slaughter, the cannons have never ceased to thunder, proof of the fact that the capitalist mode of production, particularly in its imperialist phase, means a state of permanent warfare, both between the inevitably competing economies and against the proletariat. Since the mid-Nineteen Seventies, the beginning of the most acute phase in the economic crisis closing the post-war cycle of accumulation, the wars between imperialisms have become all the more bitter, destructive and widespread, and are a prelude to the outbreak of a new and bloody world conflict, when made inevitable by objective conditions. Today the whole area ranging from North Africa to India through the Middle East and on to the Yellow Sea and Sea of Japan is either a single, bloody battleground or a place where tremendous explosive tension is building up.
Proletarians in all countries, with their living and working conditions (unemployment, precariousness, savage work rhythms, economic and social marginalization, tragic migration caused by wars and imbalances in production) under attack from all sides, must not and can not fall into the increasingly evident trap of “support for their own bourgeoisie”, “defence of the national economy”, “support for the war effort” and so on. Instead, they must start once again to recognize themselves as a force that is antagonistic to the ruling class and its needs, the State that defends its survival, gun in hand, and the institutional trade unions, which have become a pillar of this State – the only force that can really block the military efforts of its “own” bourgeoisie. Proletarians must again return to the path of open class war, striking at the ruling class where it is at its most sensitive – profit – and taking up again the classical weapons of the proletarian struggle: increasingly widespread and coordinated strike action, joint territorial organisms, more and more stable and widespread. They must overcome and wipe out all artificially created divisions within their ranks: age, gender, occupation, nationality, religion, language, etc., but also local and corporative identity, closure in the prisons of jobs, illusions of democracy and parliamentary representation, reformism and “self-management”; as well as racism, a lethal weapon directed against the proletarians themselves.
Most important, they must understand (and the facts are there for all to see) that the impossibility for the national bourgeoisies to solve their social-economic difficulties by any means other than warfare, slaughter, devastation, anti-proletarian repression is the sign that this mode of production has been at the end of its tether for a long time now. To continue keeping it alive under the illusion that it may become something other than itself, means becoming accomplices of those same wars, massacres, devastations, repressions – of an endless, obscene agony that must be stopped, understanding with clear-sighted passion the immediate need to put an end to humankind’s pre-history and to a society divided into classes. Against any, even disguised form of nationalism, we must return to the path of proletarian internationalism: and this necessarily means the strengthening and worldwide rooting of the revolutionary party, the essential guide for the assault on bourgeois power, and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, as a passage, in the end, to a classless society – to communism.
March 2016
International Communist Party