La Sinistra Comunista Internazionale

Either the war passes or the revolution passes

Proletarians of all countries unite!

With this exhortation, Marx and Engels’ Manifesto of the Communist Party concluded; this was in 1848. With the publication of this document, the League of Communists (born in 1847) in 1849 drew the lines for the proletariat to follow in its struggle for emancipation against its enemy, the bourgeoisie. It described communist society and antivided the future of humanity liberated from the capitalist yoke. Along that historical line would be the Paris Commune in 1871 and the October Revolution in 1917. The German Revolution and the Hungarian Revolution in 1919.

In 1919, the Third International, a world party of the labor movement, addressed the proletariat, setting, up to its second congress, the cardinal principles and directives to be followed in order to advance the revolutionary movement throughout the world. Unfortunately, these generous attempts were defeated by the combined reaction of the bourgeoisie, social democracy and Stalinism; capitalism survived for another century, ravaging the planet with wars, recurring crises, and environmental devastation resulting in millions of deaths. The very survival of the species is called into question.

In post-World War II Italy, the International Communist Party would take on the task of reconnecting the thread of time along the lines of the Historic Party. With its cyclopean work, it reaffirmed the cornerstones of Marxist doctrine, its rigorously scientific method, the invariance of its principles, drawing an inescapable historical balance sheet on the degeneration of the revolutionary experience in Russia, on Stalinism as the ideology of Russian capitalism and its nefarious consequences on the international workers’ movement that endure to this day. Today the world proletariat is steadily increasing and is the majority of the population; its economic conditions are barely acceptable only within the narrow bands of working-class aristocracy in Western metropolises. In the West and throughout the rest of the world, conditions for the bulk of the proletariat are generally miserable and often bordering on survival. The pace of work becomes unsustainable and safety conditions steadily deteriorate, resulting in deaths all the time. The ruling class, the imperialist bourgeoisie (the big state molochs and its allies and vassals) maintains its power through intensive exploitation of wage labor and natural resources. With its wars, an unbroken series from the post-World War II period to the present, it desperately attempts to counter the fall in the average profit essay. Volcanic capitalist production inevitably runs aground in the immense swamp of the now-saturated market. The overproduction of goods is continuous cause for trade confrontation, competition is played out in trade warfare, and when trade warfare is no longer enough, the confrontation becomes armed.

Capitalism has exhausted its historical cycle for a century now and has entered its senile phase. Seventy years ago we wrote that capitalism is “a corpse that still walks.” Today the same bourgeois ideologues say verbatim that “capitalism is practically dead” (article by a well-known economist in Milano finanza). Of course, they fail to draw logical consequences from this and propose impossible recipes. The only poisoned recipe that agonizing capitalism can offer is that of generalized war. With war one destroys living labor (the unproductive proletariat) and dead labor (surplus goods) so as to revive the production cycle. World War I produced (also calculating the resulting Spanish epidemic) 65 million dead; World War II 80 million. Impressive figures bearing in mind that the population at the time did not reach 2 billion. Today with a population approaching 8 billion how many deaths would a war produce, even taking into account modern technologies? It is now clear that the trend toward a generalized clash is becoming highly probable. The ideologues of the bourgeoisie have long been at work spreading their poison: nationalism, racism, anti-Semitism, militarism. This is to ensnare the proletariat under the various national flags.

In imperialist wars there are no attackers and aggressed; the only aggressed is the world proletariat and the main victim is the civilian population.

So, in the face of this nefarious and destructive prospect, let us make an appeal to all proletarians: let us not allow the bourgeoisie to put us in a position to shoot our proletarian brothers, let us fight to defend our class, our allies are the proletarians all over the world, there are no frontiers that divide the proletariat because it has no nation, no homeland to defend but only one power to bring down: the state bourgeois power in every part of the world.

Italian proletarians: your enemy is at home, it is your warmongering bourgeoisie. The Italian government supplies arms to the Ukrainian army, and to all governments that are willing to pay. It participates in missions in war zones, has its military ships in the Bab-El-Mandel Gulf (Red Sea), repels immigrants causing death by the thousands in the Mediterranean Sea.

– Let this May 1st be defeatist.

– The real alternative is not war or peace, but war or revolution. Tertium non datur .

– Let this May 1 be immediately of struggle for higher wages, for the decrease of working hours, against the continuous massacres at work.

– Let this May 1 be of struggle for the emancipation of humanity from capitalism, for a harmonious society, for communism.

As we wrote in 1951 : “You cannot stop, only the proletarian revolution can, by destroying your power.”