Workers of the world, unite!
AGAINST IMPERIALIST WAR, PROLETARIAN INTERNATIONALISM
On February 24th, 2022, the Russian imperialist army has started a large-scale attack against the Ukrainian state which has been armed and prepared for years by the European and U.S. imperialisms.
What historical processes determine the situation?
The center of gravity of world capitalism has been shifting and is shifting towards Asia (first the productive, then the commercial and finally the financial one), determining a gradual but inexorable loss of power of the winners of the 2nd world slaughter (USA in the first place).
The division of the world carried out at Yalta and Potsdam in 1945 among the victorious capitalist powers of the second world slaughter has long since ceased to correspond to the real balance of power between the various imperialisms.
The world order inaugurated with the atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, by the bombings of Dresden and Hamburg, on the ashes of the incineration on the war fronts and in the rear of tens of millions of workers throughout the world for the greater glory of capital, has expired.
The development of capitalism to all corners of the world and the volcano of production in Asia have plunged capitalism since 2008 into a great crisis of overproduction of which the episodes are following one after the other. This crisis of capitalist overproduction is sinking the rate of profit, sharpening the trade war and imposing the need for the destruction of the productive forces as a capitalist way out of the crisis.
Both the rupture of the division of the world and the crisis of relative overproduction of capitals lead the capitalist world towards imperialist war; it is not a question of the madness of one or another puppet but of the essence of the capitalist solution to the crisis: "And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced DESTRUCTION of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the CONQUEST of new markets, and by the more thorough EXPLOITATION of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented." (Manifesto of the Communist Party).
Synthetic notes on the process of rupture of the world division and the crisis of overproduction
The victorious capitalist powers of the 2nd world slaughter (among them Russian imperialism, falsely called socialist) divided up Europe and the World. The period of post-war reconstruction lasted until the 1970s, in parallel with the development and culmination of the anti-colonial bourgeois revolutions in Asia (of which Maoism is one more expression) and Africa, culminating in the defeat of the US in Vietnam in 1975. At the end of this cycle, the first US trade deficit, the rupture of the Bretton Woods agreements, the beginning of the fall in interest rates and the increase in US indebtedness signaled the first symptoms of the gradual decline of US imperialism.
From this moment the US tried to slow down capitalist development in Asia and Africa and their incorporation into the world market together with South America, fighting to block the interconnection and development of new capitalist areas (military coups in South America, overthrow of the Shah, Iraq-Iran war in 1980-1988, etc.).
But the capitalist powers defeated in the second world slaughter were recovering more quickly, having suffered greater destruction. German imperialism initiated the steps of its recovery with the ECSC (1951), the EEC and the EAEC (1957), with the objective shared with the French bourgeoisie that the third world war would not happen again in Europe. With the fall of false socialism in Russia (from 1989) and the crumbling of the Eastern capitalist bloc, the chains preventing the reunification of Germany and the imperialist recovery of its sphere of influence were broken. The other loser, Japan, managed to occupy the first 10 banks by assets in 1990 and to multiply by 10 the robotization of its industry in relation to the US and Germany.
The Iraq war (1990) was the US response to stop the "vanquished" threatening to dethrone it. By imposing the payment of war costs, with the contingency of Japanese production, it was imposed on a disarmed Japan to stew in the sauce of its own relative overproduction of capital. It did not work so well with Germany, which managed to impose the dismemberment of Yugoslavia (1991-1999), the creation of the EU (1993) and, after overcoming the attack on the European Monetary System in 1992, managed to launch its currency in 1999 in the financial markets to compete with the dollar as a hoarding currency and world currency.
In 2000 the ".coms" burst and the airlines went bankrupt in the US, and US imperialism proceeded to try the same recipe after the opportune self-attacks of 9/11 in 2001, with the invasion of Afghanistan. The failure of the attempt to take control of PDVSA in 2002 determined the US bourgeoisie to invade Iraq (2003) in order to unload the war on the rest of the competitors and to put oil at a price that would allow the launching of fracking gas and become a purely fossil fuel exporting country. But the high prices not only benefited the US, but also revived the Russian imperialist power from the disaster suffered in 1989.
In 2008, the crisis of relative overproduction of capital began in a general way, which has led world capitalism to witness the complete reversal of its parameters and coordinates for a not insignificant period of time (negative interest rates, trillions of dollars of debt with negative nominal yields, capital purchase and injection programs, etc.).
Twenty years after 2001, U.S. imperialism has not been able to maintain its positions and is withdrawing with its tail between its legs from Iraq and Afghanistan. Meanwhile, Chinese capitalist imperialism is expanding throughout the world with the New Silk Road and European imperialism - which thought itself immune - is seeing with alarm how it is being displaced by Russia and China in Africa (withdrawal from the Sahel) and even from its backyard and area of influence (Eastern Europe and the Balkans).
It is in this context that the different capitalist imperialisms (USA, EU, China, Russia, etc.) are taking positions for this war through the multiple conflicts that are developing in the world (Ethiopia, Yemen, Taiwan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, etc.). Any one of these conflicts can ignite the enormous powder keg of the multiplied accumulated war destructive capacity and start the fire of the third world war.
The proletarian alternative to war is anti-capitalist social revolution
The role reserved for the proletariat in the bourgeois script we have described and in the subsequent episodes is that of cannon fodder in the field of exploitation and on the war front, unless it rises up against the exploiters as a class for itself and not for capital, resumes the class struggle and constitutes itself into an International Communist Party.
From the First World War, in the heat of the October Revolution, arose in 1919 the Communist International, organ for international revolution, declaring to the world proletariat:
"‘Remember the imperialist war!' These are the first words addressed by the Communist International to every working man and woman; wherever they live and whatever language they speak. Remember that because of the existence of capitalist society a handful of imperialists were able to force the workers of the different countries for four long years to cut each other's throats. Remember that the war of the bourgeoisie conjured up in Europe and throughout the world the most frightful famine and the most appalling misery. Remember that without the overthrow of capitalism the repetition of such robber wars is not only possible but inevitable. (...) The imperialist war once again confirmed what was written in the statutes of the First International: the emancipation of the workers is not a local, nor a national, but an international problem." (Statutes of the Communist International, II Congress, 1920).
This International suffered a serious degeneration in the course of a short period of time by committing a series of tactical (political united front, 1921), tactical-programmatic (workers government, 1922), organizational (the wrongly called "Bolshevization", 1924) errors that led to the Stalinist counterrevolution (the "socialism in one country" or the lie that in Russia there was socialism, 1926). These errors destroyed the International itself, turning it into a subsidiary subordinated to the needs of the construction of capitalism in Russia. Stalinism was not the cause but the product of these errors and deviations.
Without the complete and definitive overcoming of these tactical-programmatic-organizational errors the resumption of the class line, of the International Communist Party, is impossible. Without the reappropriation of the Marxist program and theory an alternative to the macabre script reconstruction-overproduction-crisis-war-destruction is impossible: "without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement." (Lenin, What is to be done?, 1903).
The Stalinist counterrevolution broke the backbone of the world proletariat which still suffers the consequences of this defeat and of the false association of socialism with the ragged capitalism that developed in Russia and satellites or Cuba (hardly anyone can swallow that there is socialism in China). Already in 1934, Stalinist Russia had entered the League of Nations, stigmatized by Lenin as the "thieves’ kitchen". In 1943, in the midst of the Second World War, Stalinism dissolved the corpse of the International as an offering to better divide Europe and the world with the rest of the imperialist powers.
Well, in the present situation in which capitalism has spread to the last corner of the world and in the face of the deepening of the current crisis of overproduction and the sharpening of conflicts between imperialist powers, what is the international position of the communists?
Today as yesterday, the militant communist position is that of revolutionary defeatism, the transformation of imperialist war into revolutionary civil war: " The proletariat must not only oppose all such wars, but must also wish for the defeat of its 'own' government in such wars and utilize its defeat for revolutionary insurrection, if an insurrection to prevent the war proves unsuccessful."(The Military Program of the Proletarian Revolution, Lenin, 1916). Any defense of one's own "country" is to betray the cause of the revolution: "The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got." (Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848).
Any pacifist illusion in a capitalism without wars is a social stupefacient which delivers the proletariat bound hand and foot to its bourgeoisie at the moment of truth: "6th (...) without the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism no international court of arbitration, no agreement to limit armaments, no 'democratic' reorganization of the League of Nations, will be able to prevent new imperialist wars." (Conditions of Admission, II Congress of the Communist International, 1920).
"Only by cursing all war and everything military, only be demanding disarmament? The women of an oppressed and really revolutionary class will never accept that shameful role. They will say to their sons: “You will soon be grown up. You will be given a gun. Take it and learn the military art properly. The proletarians need this knowledge not to shoot your brothers, the workers of other countries, as is being done in the present war, and as the traitors to socialism are telling you to do. They need it to fight the bourgeoisie of their own country, to put an end to exploitation, poverty and war, and not by pious wishes, but by defeating and disarming the bourgeoisie.” (.....) "Only after the proletariat has disarmed the bourgeoisie will it be able, without betraying its world-historic mission, to consign all armaments to the scrap-heap. And the proletariat will undoubtedly do this, but only when this condition has been fulfilled, certainly not before." (The Military Program of the Proletarian Revolution, Lenin, 1916).
This world is sinking and threatens to drag us down with it, we have no patches to put on it but a new society to fight and live for. And not a caricature of it with changed names (as in Russia, Cuba, China, Venezuela, etc.) but a truly communist society: without wage labor, without market, without anarchy of production, without State, without crisis, without wars... in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all (Manifesto of the Communist Party).
For proletarian internationalism!
- Rejection of all nationalism.
- Rejection of solidarity with the corporate economy and with the "national" economy.
- Revolutionary defeatism against the bourgeoisie itself in times of commercial or military war.
- Joint and international organization of the proletarians of all languages in the International Communist Party for the communist revolution on a world scale.
DOWN WITH CRIMINAL AND MURDEROUS CAPITALISM!
INTERNATIONAL COMMUNIST PARTY - "THE INTERNATIONALIST PROLETARIAN" - February 2022 - pcielcomunista.org - @pcielcomunista