All over the world, proletarians are under attack. The bourgeoisie and its organs of mass disinformation maintain that “we have come through the crisis”. Yet, disguised as precarious, unemployment grows endlessly. The pace and conditions of work worsen constantly. The veritable mass murders of proletarians in factories, building yards, on the streets and in the fields reaches shocking figures. What is paid out on rent (if and when it’s possible to find a hole to live in!), food, gas and electricity (which, together with a roof over your head, are basic necessities!), transport (to get to work or look for it!) becomes a stranglehold. Daily living conditions get more and more difficult and alarming, weighing heavily on single people, couples, young and old people. The magistrates and the “forces of law and order” persecute the proletariat in its struggle, banning or attacking pickets, continuously elaborating new measures of repression and intimidation and activating a reign of terror against those who defend what had been attained through long, hard battles over past years. The institutional trade unions and reformist and parliamentary parties have long been pillars of the “established order” and act solely to defend the interests of Capital, the State and the Nation. Nationalist and religious superstitions also weigh like bricks: they delude proletarians that they can find a way out of day-to-day desperation and terror and contribute to separating them and keeping them on opposing sides, in order to weaken them when the time comes for the necessary battle. Adding to this alarming picture, come the individual or group undertakings of squalid racists and neo-fascists, acting as miserable henchmen in the defence of bourgeois interests, spreading terror and division in the rank and file of the proletariat, attacking the worst exploited, the most vulnerable, the most liable to be blackmailed: the growing mass of migrants fleeing the disaster and mass murder that all the imperialist powers have been producing in Africa and Asia for so many decades. And so, finally, come the wars: over an area that covers the southern and eastern rims of the Mediterranean, from Morocco to Syria, with ramifications that reach as far as the Ukraine on one side and Afghanistan and Yemen on the other, the bloody claws of all imperialisms (USA and Israel, Russia and Great Britain, France and Italy, Germany and China, Iran and Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and so on) rip into the flesh of massacred, bombed, burned and gassed proletarians. They are wars for the control of energy sources, wars of strategic manoeuvring, imperialist wars which, in the long term, prepare the way for a new overall conflict – a world war that has already devastated the planet twice – Capital’s last resource for escaping its own structural crises.
Faced with all this, the proletariat – divided, disillusioned, intimidated – must rediscover the path of open struggle, against all bourgeois institutions. It must regain its own total, organizational and political autonomy. It must fight to equip itself with stable territorial organisms to defend living and working conditions. It must once more become aware of the immense power it has in terms of numbers and international scope, organizing itself against all divisions, all misleading illusions, all the hypocritical claims of the institutional trade unions, the constitutional parties of one State or another, one Nation or the other, or of any nationalist prospect. Above all, it must realize that it has no friends amongst the national and international predators and refuse right from the start to take any side in the conflict.
Alongside it in the hard battles that are being prepared, we communists work to make this perspective clearer day by day: so that, in the inevitable class wars of today and tomorrow, after almost a century of defeat and betrayal, the path may once again open up towards a classless society, without exploitation and war – towards communism.
International Communist Party