La Sinistra Comunista Internazionale

Eighty years ago, the end of the immense carnage of the Second World War did not interrupt the series of imperialist wars. An uninterrupted succession of conflicts has sown death and destruction on every continent. To the bloodiest wars that have ravaged countries in Asia such as Vietnam, Afghanistan and the Middle East (Iraq, Iran, Palestine), we must add the myriad ‘forgotten wars’ in Africa and South America. In these eighty years, in a world dominated by capital, not a single day has passed without the sound of cannons, not a single day has the deadly scythe of bourgeois rule refrained from reaping new victims among the proletariat.

Even the European continent, which according to the mendacious narrative of bourgeois propaganda is experiencing the longest period of peace in its history, has been affected by two terrible conflicts in the Balkans and today in Ukraine, which have claimed hundreds of thousands of victims. Never before have such large numbers of proletarians fallen on opposing battlefronts, died under bombs in cities or been forced into the painful condition of refugees.

Most of these conflicts, as is the case in the current imperialist phase, have been proxy wars aimed at plundering mineral and energy resources or controlling trade routes. In such disputes, the stakes have been to establish the hegemonic role of one of the great imperialist blocs in struggle.

War propaganda, bourgeois chauvinism and the warmongering of the rulers of the day have succeeded in rallying the proletariat and convincing it to fight and die for ‘just causes’ such as democracy, violated sovereignty and the national interest. Bourgeois ideology sowed the seeds of partisanship and the idea of the ‘attacked homeland’.

The proletariat has no homeland

The proletariat will not pay for the economic crisis that is gripping the capitalist system and which regularly has to resort to the systematic destruction of goods, capital and labour power in an attempt to rejuvenate this decrepit social organisation, in order to overturn the grim prognosis that our revolutionary Marxist political current has pronounced on it for over a century and a half.

Capitalism will never be able to reverse the historical tendency of the fall in the average rate of profit, which inevitably returns in the form of a systemic crisis at the peak of each cycle of capital accumulation. The bourgeoisie therefore finds in war the draconian cure to try to revive an already rotten social organisation and allow capital to regain its ability to valorise itself.

The destruction of material goods, natural resources and proletarians in flesh and blood: this is the war looming on the not-so-distant horizon: the United States has lost its absolute economic hegemony, even if it maintains military superiority over its rivals; Russia, China and the countries that make up the BRICS have achieved such economic development that they can compete directly with the Western bloc in the global market, even if for now they have not created an imperialist bloc alternative to that of the United States, nor have they formed solid political and military alliances.

The economic friction of recent years, the centrifugal forces within the blocs, the tariff war waged by the US administration and the stock market crashes are all phenomena that are part of the intensification of global competition. The current phase is therefore seeing growing rivalry even between traditional allies, as demonstrated by the fog that has descended on the Atlantic, foreshadowing a sort of cold war between the United States and European countries. All these phenomena are destined to prepare the clash between the great state Molochs, which will play the game for their own hegemony in all the war scenarios around the world.

· Not a penny, not a soldier must be sacrificed for bourgeois interests.

· ‘Revolutionary defeatism’ is our watchword.

· The enemy to be defeated is the bourgeoisie in our own country.

In this grim phase of war preparations, in which new massacres of workers are being announced, the proletariat has the task of asserting its own defence, the defence of its living conditions through the struggle for wages, for the reduction of working hours and exploitation, and to put an end to deaths at work. It is not in their interest to defend the national economy, which, in the midst of a crisis of overproduction, is constantly expelling thousands of workers from the production cycle, reducing them and their families to poverty, while not a single day goes by without new victims being added to the martyrology of the ‘heroes of labour’.

In 1889, a day of global struggle for the reduction of working hours was proclaimed. It was to fall on 1 May and was a direct provocation by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie. Today, in almost all countries, 1 May has become a popular demonstration or a moment of celebration, thus losing its original meaning. Worse still, it has become a ritual of solidarity between trade unions and state institutions in support of the national economy. In reality, it is a patriotic celebration that serves to support the interests of one country against another, forming part of a policy of competition between states.

‘The organisation of workers into economic trade unions operates within the limits of the struggle to lower the rate of surplus value; their further organisation into political parties expresses their ability to set themselves as a class the goal of overthrowing the power of the bourgeoisie, of suppressing capitalism, with a radical reduction in the amount of work, an increase in consumption and general well-being.’ (taken from: ‘Property and Capital, Ed. Iskra, Nov. 1980, Sul filo del tempo n. 6)

Workers, workers of the world, unite! proclaimed the Communist Manifesto of 1848 by K. Marx and F. Engels. You have nothing to lose but your chains; your independent struggle will be the struggle of the proletarian class for a classless society, without markets or commodities, without exploitation. Only the dictatorship of the proletarian class, led by the future international communist party, can stop the coming barbarism of imperialist war.

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

(First World War, German and British soldiers fraternise, refusing to fight)

The International Communist Left c/o Circolo Operaio di Magrè, Via Cristoforo n. 69 – 36015 Schio (VI) www.sinistracomunistainternazionale.com s.i.p.