Capitalism is War

To stop it, the working class must bring capitalism down

It had to happen, the clash between capitalisms, between the States sharing the world, is inevitable. Ukraine is only the beginning: the clash is global, between imperialist States, not between “democracies” and “authoritarian regimes” as they want to present it. From the United States to China to Russia, to Great Britain, Japan, Germany, France and Italy, they are all arming themselves to the teeth to divide up territories and spheres of influence all over the world. Relations between States are based on force and not on abstract international law.

The distinction between aggressors and aggressed is false, it is an ideological tool to justify imperialist warfare on either side of the front.

All national capitalisms are aggressors and aggressed at the same time.

They are all threatened by the global crisis of the capitalist economy, which is inexorably advancing due to the enormous overproduction of goods and capital, aggravated by the pandemic. They are at each other’s throats in order to survive, to share the declining profits.

And because capitalism feels threatened by what it itself has produced in its development: Communism. Communism is the spectre maturing within the modern world itself, looming materially over every aspect of life. Capitalism has formed and magnified its gravedigger, the international proletariat, destined to revolt under the conditions of misery into which the crisis is leading it.

What drives capitalisms to war is not a particular political ideology or culture or national tradition: these are just the lies with which bourgeois regimes try to justify conflicts and absolve capitalism of its infamies.

Russia, which was communist in October, since the Stalinist counterrevolution and the defeat of the Bolshevik old guard, has degenerated to become a capitalist State among others.

What provokes the imperialist war are the immense economic interests of big capital. Every day for these interests billions of proletarians are exploited, laid off and starved, made to work in conditions that cause their death by accident or disease. In order to save costs and make more profit, the bourgeoisie causes environmental, industrial, infrastructural and health disasters that claim thousands of victims.

The imperialist war is not only a conflict between bourgeoisies to divide up the world market: it is a war of all bourgeoisies united against workers all over the world to keep them divided, subjugated, terrified. The only solution capitalism has to its economic crisis is to oppose life: to destroy not only the surplus goods, but also the living beings themselves, the workforce-commodity, the workers, by the millions.

A few weeks before entering Ukraine, Russian soldiers were sent to Kazakhstan to help the local bourgeois regime smother in blood the proletarian uprising that had broken out over the rising price of gas, a repression that received the unanimous consent of all the bourgeoisies in the world, from the falsely communist Chinese, to the autocratic Turkish, to the Western democracies.

All the interests of capital, and its very survival, are concentrated in the State and military machinery. Their protection leads them inexorably to war.

If the working class does not succeed in overthrowing capitalism first, a vast and devastating conflict will turn the world into a battlefield in which the workers will be called upon to shed blood only for the interests of their respective bourgeoisies and the preservation of their political power.

Eastern Europe is only one of the fronts on which imperialisms are clashing: the same glimmers of war are rising from the Pacific, around Taiwan and China, the main strategic adversary of US imperialism.

The war in Ukraine, like the previous one in Yugoslavia, once again dispels the illusion of a peaceful Europe and confirms what revolutionary Marxism has always denounced: there can be no peace as long as capitalism exists; there can be no peaceful coexistence between national capitalisms.

The war in Ukraine is therefore not only caused by Putin’s aggressive policy, as they superficially want you to believe: it is caused by the bourgeois regime, which is Russian and worldwide. It is provoked by capitalism, all of which is pregnant with war.

In order to stop it, the workers must not follow the indications of either the nationalist, openly bourgeois parties or the opportunist workers’ parties, which always tell them to “choose”, and side with the “less warmongering”, “less anti-proletarian”, “more democratic” front than the other. Workers must unite, across borders, against all imperialist fronts and first and foremost against their own bourgeoisie. The first communist watchword of 1848 – Proletarians of all countries unite! – is still valid and relevant today.

The communists’ watchword in the war is the one that was Lenin’s and the left-wing communists’ against the First World War: turn imperialist war into revolution.

Workers from today must separate their orientation and attitude from those of their own bourgeoisie, from today they must fight in defence of their living and working conditions, against their own national capitalism.

There is no commonality of interests between the working class and the bourgeois class. The so-called “common good of the country” is just an ideological cloak that disguises the defence of the interests of national capitalism.

For workers to support their own bourgeoisie today, accepting sacrifices in terms of living and working conditions in order to make the “country system” more competitive, means tying themselves to the wagon of the ruling class, which will lead them tomorrow to shed blood in defence of the social privilege and political domination that oppresses them.

The way to salvation lies not in the prevalence of their own bourgeoisie in the world arena, but in the international unity of the working class against capitalism.

For this social war we need the weapons of proletarian struggle, we need to rebuild real class trade unions, and to fight under the flag of the International Communist Party.