For Anti‑Militarism and Proletarian Internationalism

Leaflet for a strike at the Port of Genoa, Monday 17 February

Peace is impossible in capitalism because war is a product of its irreformable economic laws.

On the one hand, war is the military continuation of economic competition. In times of economic growth this competition is predominantly contained in the commercial sphere. In times of crisis, it becomes so bitter as to lead States, the defenders of the general interests of all national capitalisms, into the clash of war. Hints of this epilogue are economic protectionism, accompanied by nationalism – both right and “left” – in the political field, all of which are well present today.

But war is the only solution that capitalism, as a whole, has to the devastating crisis of overproduction in its economy. This solution comes before and beyond any means of dividing the world market among the bourgeoisie of every country. This immense destruction of goods already produced – infrastructure, industries, cities and “labor force” – prevents a further valorization of capital (vulgarly called “growth”). War comes to save all national capitalisms, winners and losers, offering a bath of youth to a dying and anti‑historical way of production.

Capitalism thus offers both the greatest progress and the greatest barbarity that human history has ever experienced. The so‑called “economic miracle” after World War II was only possible because of the immense destruction and deaths of over 50 million people during the war; almost all of which were proletarians and poor farmers in the metropolises and colonies. After which, the brutal exploitation of the working class intensified in the name of “national reconstruction”.

It was the World War – by the admission of the bourgeois economists themselves – which solved the economic crisis in which capitalism sank in the first half of the 20th century. The policies of State intervention in the economy create no solutions to the crisis. These policies had been applied indifferently by all bourgeois regimes, democratic and Nazi‑Fascist alike, before the World War. They are now invoked by the reformist Left as an alternative to so‑called “neo‑liberalism”. The national ways out of the crisis brings war, not socialism, closer.

All the bourgeois States, even in times of peace, never stop maneuvering with anticipation of the general clash to come. They are aware that any lost position is granted to the “enemy”. Hence the hundreds of unceasing local wars, with millions of victims, have characterized the “peace” that followed the Second World War. These are conducted by stirring up national, ethnic and religious hatred with terrorist massacres. Such as is happening in recent weeks in northern Syria, where the clash between the regional imperialism of Syria and Turkey is consuming the skin of more than three million civilians unable to escape.

Just as contemporary war has a deeper function than the division of the world market – to save the whole of capitalism from its crisis – so too are all national bourgeoisies united in having an enemy superior to that which each of them faces militarily: the working class of all countries. Every national bourgeoisie always has two fronts and two enemies to fight: one external and one internal.

Faced with the inevitable twisting of the economic crisis that crushes the workers into misery. In the increases of exploitation of the employed and the army of the unemployed, war is a means of hindering the social revolt which, if led by the Communist Party, becomes revolution. A part of the working class is removed from the cities and led to the front to the fratricidal massacre against workers in another uniform. The bombardments on the cities further decimate the working class and reduce its strength.

This is the only solution available to the bourgeois regimes. But it is always very risky for them because it involves arming the workers. If strikes in factories and city riots break out during the war – for example in Russia in 1917, Germany in 1918, Italy in 1943, Iraq in 1991 – the internal front can collapse and rebellion can easily infect the army.

For this reason, war cannot be explained to the workers of every country by every national bourgeois regime for its authentic reasons of cowardly economic order. Nor can it be explained as an inevitable product of the economic course of the whole of capitalism. War must always be justified as a product of the will of a political party and of particularly reactionary, evil, warmongering nations, which oppress that people and nation. This is employed so as to convince the proletarian masses to support the war effort and not to rebel against the terrible living conditions it entails.

To this end, the bourgeoisie welcomes the false workers’ parties within each country. All of which are always ready for the “less worse” policy – which the bourgeoisie punctually prepares “the worst” – to set up “single political fronts” in defense of democracy and “against the right”. This is never to fight against all the bourgeois parties, right and left, for the revolutionary conquest of power. So on the international level and in the face of the dangers of war they always identify an alliance with the “less worse” capitalist States for which to lead the workers to be slaughtered.

WAR ON WAR is not a slogan of generic opposition to the militarist violence of capitalism. It is the practical indication with which the Bolshevik party in Russia, the Spartachists in Germany, and the Communist Left in Italy, proclaimed to the workers in the First World War. To “transform the war between States into war between the classes”, to apply “revolutionary defeatism” against one’s own country at war. Rather than shoot at the class brothers of other countries, turn the gun 180° to overthrow the regime of one’s own national ruling class.

The Bolshevik party, by virtue of this address, was the only one in the history of capitalism to stop the imperialist war; even when the pacifist bleating of the bourgeois left never succeeded. They did so at the price of enormous territorial losses for Russia, thus following a deeply anti‑national conduct. However the objective was the international proletarian revolution, not the struggle to “defend one’s own country”.

The inability to recognize the Stalinist counter-revolution and the capitalist nature of the USSR led the false workers’ parties to deny this direction. They instead deployed the proletariat on one of the two imperialist fronts in World War II, just as Social Democracy had done in the first. In more recent examples, support has been thrown to bourgeois regimes that oppressed and massacred poor workers and peasants like that of Serbia, Iraq, Syria, Nicaragua, Venezuela or that of Moscow in the war in the Donbass (Ukraine).

This inability to understand how the contemporary world has for decades been entirely capitalist. In not recognizing how the fight against imperialism and fascism cannot mean the fight against capitalism as a whole. Leads these false workers’ parties to fall into the ideological traps with which the national bourgeoisies try to lead the workers to war.

Only the working class has the strength to prevent or stop the war. This can be done by striking the economy of the nation at war in the factories and at the front by laying down arms and fraternizing with the workers of other countries. In so doing, conveying social revolt over national borders.

* * *

For this reason the initiative of the port workers of Genoa adhering to the Autonomous Port Workers Collective is important:

    – because anti‑militarism returns to stir anti‑militarism not as a generic pacifism to be advocated with inter‑classist demonstrations, but as a consequent action among the workers and in the trade union movement;

    – because it happens as a result of similar repeated actions in other ports of Europe and therefore takes a first practical step of international action by the workers.

It is necessary to fight so that all the conflictual trade unionism – that is, the rank and file trade unions and the opposition in CGIL – gives unitary and practical support to these initiatives, both by participating in the garrisons and the pickets and by proclaiming the strike.

It is necessary to fight for the unmasking and defeat in the workers’ movement of those opportunist parties that bend proletarian anti‑militarism and internationalism to partial political objectives. These objectives being completely compatible with those of national and international bourgeoisie fractions. This includes the exit from NATO and the closure of its bases in Italy. They are clearly implicit in putting these objectives before the conquest of political power by the working class. But this is the only revolutionary political objective for the working class. In abandoning it they only lend their support to that part of the national bourgeoisie eager to throw off its subjection to American imperialism and move on to Russian and, above all, Chinese imperialism. This has the disastrous result of favoring the deployment of the workers on one of the imperialist fronts, once again betraying internationalism.

For the international unity of the workers!
Against every front of the imperialist war!
Against every military mission of the bourgeoisie!