In the metropolises of the oldest States, as in those of the youngest, and in the peripheries of the entire capitalist world, the economic living and working conditions of the salaried workers (and, alternatively, of the half classes in decline and the proletarianised masses) worsen day by day: across-the-board increases in the cost of energy and staple commodities (housing included) and galloping inflation (resulting from the “monetary policy” of state banks that continue to deposit and lend money without managing to generate enough capital and surplus value to increase the average rate of profit). The unrelenting crisis of overproduction that has brought about a worldwide restructuring of economic enterprises (multinationals, individual or family-run firms, co-operatives, state-run companies, nationalized or otherwise), continues to spawn growing numbers of jobless and temporary workers, and an increasingly unsustainable work rate – the first and only cause behind the dizzying rise in the number of murders, serious traumatic injuries and diseases in the workplace. And the farcical wage increases of renewed contracts – for the most part dependent upon so-called ‘productivity’ – have proved worthless.
More than two years of “health crises” have only served to conceal and worsen the irreversible nature of this crisis. The “pandemic” was dealt with in criminally wicked fashion, proving that “citizen welfare” was way down on the list of bourgeois State objectives unless, of course, money could be made from ill health and its management – be that hypocritically in its “public” guise, or cynically in its “private” guise: with drugs (homeopathic and phytotherapeutic included), with vaccines (created by means of old or new technologies), with tests and diagnostic or therapeutic equipment, with the transformation of clinics into “hospital-companies” (tantamount to outright surgical-medical industries, where a rigid and alienating division of labour prevails, including contracts and precarious employment, etc.) and with more or less assisted residential institutions for the “elderly” and the “chronically ill”. In their social management of the emergency, the States resorted to the “public health” alibi and came up with a wealth of extravagant and authoritarian measures, most notably those aimed at limiting and regulating still further the “right to strike”, protest and hold meetings in public. With greater determination and efficiency than during their handling of so called “Islamic terrorism”, the States reinforced the structures of repression and political control so that the population (in primis and, unequivocally, our working class) might get used to a “state of emergency and national unity” which, in the build up to the war, would restrain as far as possible any attempt at resistance, protest, rebellion or organized opposition to the general worsening of living and working conditions.
The crisis also gives a boost to the militarist dynamics typical of the capitalist mode of production. The Second World Massacre never put paid to imperialist wars – far from it. Such wars have enabled this or that State to plunder raw materials and control their movements, export capital, conquer markets (or slices of markets) and subjugate the proletarian and proletarianised masses, while skewing the struggles for freedom of those in thrall to the old colonial imperialism. So-called international organizations like the UN, NATO, EU, OECD, WTO and so on, are nothing more than “pacts among thieves” that enshrine and underwrite the carve up, for as long as the balance of power among the dominant powers remains unaltered. As the economic crisis deepens, so the counter-measures put in place by all the States become less effective, and conflict between new alliances becomes a necessity – thus is the way paved for the fast-approaching inter-imperialist war: events in the Balkans, the Middle East, Africa, Caucasia and, lastly, the Ukraine, are nothing if not cruel harbingers of what is to come.
All wars have had – and will always have – an ideological front, a pretext for sending to the slaughter (active and passive), our fellow class comrades, against this or that “enemy”, trapped inside the confines of the cattle pen of “National Unity”, and the “Homeland” (whose multiple epithets include socialist, democratic, home to civilization, chosen people, etc...) by the bourgeois State, which is, and remains, the collective capitalist whose governing body is solely, and always, a
bourgeois business committee. What is currently taking place in Ukraine is the most obvious and dramatic example: one step further towards a new generalized war, a new worldwide massacre.
All this brings us to the most difficult part of the story. As always, there’s a lot to do. But what? And how? First of all, let us dismiss the hope that the sole action generated by the precipitous and generalized worsening of our conditions of life and survival, the exhaustion of limited reserves and the erosion of reformist guarantees (or even war itself), may mechanically ensure a reaction of political revolt. Our class has endured – and continues to suffer from – a decades-long reactionary conditioning of democratic-Nazi-Fascist-Stalinist (and post-Stalinist) measures, whose origins can be traced back to the systematic destruction of our revolutionary organizations, and nourished by the hard earned scraps obtained through ordinary union struggles. And today the reformist siren- calls beckon ad nauseam, duping the majority of our class brothers and sisters into believing there is still something to be gained from breaking our backs in the name of capitalism, with the active complicity of the official unions by now wholly integrated into the State: ballot-boxed institutions, economic democracy, “culture”, “civilization”, the vague “interests of the people” versus the ravenous appetites of the usual speculators, the welfare state, the redistribution of wealth through an inheritance tax ...
The road to recovery will be painful and toilsome, but there are no alternatives: our working class alone has the chance and (in the making) the social and political wherewithal to put an end to the filthy society of Capital, provided it first organizes itself and fights for its own survival and then, consequently, does away with the militarist power of the capitalist bourgeoisie.
Resume the path of strike action to strike at the heart of bourgeois interests and interrupt the production of capitalist wealth – a path that implies the blockade of proletarian neighborhoods together with any other practice for breaking up the nominal “social peace”.
Resume the path of independent political struggle, pitted against and enemy to all political parties and institutions of the State, of all States.
Get stronger and unite in a Communist Party with established roots worldwide: a tool, a weapon, an indispensable organ in the struggle to defeat the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and its reformist skivvies, to guide the revolutionary process that ensures our class constitutes the ruling class, and to direct the organs of its domination (the transitory yet necessary phase involving the dictatorship of the proletariat). A domination that will finally put an end to all societies built upon a ruthless and alienating social division of labour, and where private ownership of the land and means of production is sacred.
To this task, to this fight, the comrades of the International Communist Party call you!