From Libya to Iran, through Syria and Iraq, the winds of war are blowing with increasing violence. While the slaughter of civilians continues in Syria and Yemen (though the latter, it appears, is less newsworthy at the moment) and in Libya increasing chaos reigns due to a war at least partly fought by proxy with the military and diplomatic involvement of the main imperialist players, the recent episodes on Iraqi and Iranian soil (the tactical killing of General Soleimani by the USA, the military reaction from Teheran, the “incident” of the Ukrainian aircraft shot down “by mistake”) are all signals of aggravation in the clashes between imperialisms, independently of foreseeable future turns of events or those already going on, or of any temporary relaxation of tension, or the constant work of diplomacy going on behind the scenes.
As is – or should be – well known, Capital does not like the state of war but is forced into it, and for the following main reasons: war acts as a counter trend to the fall of the average profit rate and is one of the means that national Capital resorts to, in order to stem it or at least slow it down (Marx, Capital, Book Three); war can act as a powerful element of patriotic mobilization, rallying classes around the “higher interests of the Nation” and, above all, chasing the proletariat into the blind alley of nationalism.
The latter point should be carefully borne in mind. The continuing tendency to turn the war and its effects into a show strongly affected the huge wave of commiseration that followed the killing of the general in Iran: yet few remembered the equally widespread public demonstrations, with their dead and wounded, that had been filling the streets of Iraq and Iran for months and at the heart of which were and continue to be the constant worsening in living and working conditions of vast masses of proletarians, proletarianized half classes and those on the way to proletarianization. We have always welcomed these demonstrations, pointing to them as a further signal of the way that irreparable contradictions are maturing in the capitalist mode of production; but at the same time, just as clearly, we have pointed out their limits: the way they are progressively subordinated to democratic and petit-bourgeois objectives, the dramatic dispersion of potentially classist energy in the smoke of ideological, reformist and anti-proletarian constructs. We have repeated that, far from aligning with them or seeing in them something that they are not and cannot be (a wholly imaginary revolutionary recovery), the more and more frequent explosions of these contradictions have demonstrated the urgent need for a serious preparation of the proletarian revolution, not to be left up to the whill o’ the whisps of one – however generous – “intifada” or the other.
Faced with these episodes and the certainty that they will multiply over time to come, at the centre of this preparation for revolution must stand the only position that allows the international proletariat to avoid being dragged once again into an imperialist war, as unfortunately happened in the past, with the tremendous slaughter of the Second World War and the bloody post-war period, in which we are still immersed today. This position can ONLY be the following:
- The world proletariat HAS NO friends amongst the imperialist brigands and HAS NO national or patriotic duties to perform
- Its objective is to take sides NOT on one side rather than the other, in a conflict between imperialisms, but AGAINST its own bourgeoisie and ALONGSIDE the proletariat of other countries
- This implies resuming with determination the path of struggle and class organization, responding blow for blow to any aggression, and subjecting bourgeois militarism and petit-bourgeois pacifism to firm criticism, as an essential precondition for activating determined revolutionary defeatism, sabotaging all war efforts by the ruling class in question.
All this will only be possible on one condition (we repeat this firmly, aware of the dramatic consequences of a historical delay which occurs for many reasons and which we have returned to on several occasions) [1] and that is, that its OWN party, the international communist party, strengthen and put down strong roots worldwide, as the only NECESSARY point of reference for the militant avant-gardes that the crimes and disasters of capitalism cannot help producing, driving them onto the battlefield of open class warfare. Only in this way will it be possible, in a necessarily violent clash with the old and rotten world of capitalist production, represented and defended by the State with the parties and movements that embody and support it, to set out towards the necessary SEIZING OF POWER and the establishment of the DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT directed by its party, as a bridge towards a classless society, COMMUNISM.
If we fail to acknowledge this condition and do not work towards it, continuing instead to believe in the “movement” as an end in itself, in the automaticy of economic crisis-social crisis-revolutionary crisis, in the mechanical and metaphysical appearance of a revolutionary party emerging from union battles, in the expectations for a Messiah-like party which, like a deus-ex-macchina, appears out of nothing “when time is ripe for the revolution”, then the umpteenth, bloody disaster will strike the whole world. And it will be the HUMAN SPECIES that will once again pay the price.
January 202
[1] For example, “Profondità della crisi generale e ritardo storico della rivoluzione proletaria”, Il programma comunista, n.3/2019. The article will be soon translated into English as well.
International Communist Party