The First Step to Stop the Imperialist War is to Refuse to Pay its Costs

ICP leaflet in Italy for Unione Sindacale di Base (USB)

September 2022

World capitalism is entering a new recession. This is happening without most of the capitalistically mature – so-called Western – countries having recovered their pre-2008 crisis production levels.

These countries are sinking into the crisis of overproduction that began in 1973-74, which they have been able to survive, for half a century now, thanks to an increasing attack on the achievements of the labor movement, State and private indebtedness, and the full development of capitalism in the so-called “developing” countries, which, with their low labor costs and their rates of growth of young capitalisms, have held back the fall in the profit rate.

But the inexorable economic laws of capitalism – which only Marxism has been able to understand and explain – are also driving those capitalisms, no longer youthful, into the crisis of overproduction, a historical fact of which the recent bursting of the real estate speculative bubble in China was a symptom.

World capitalism is marching toward its inevitable economic ruin, increasingly plunging all of humanity further into barbarism every day.

The worst and most peculiar product of the capitalist economic crisis is imperialist war. Points of friction between world and regional imperialisms, and between their vassal capitalist states, are increasing in number and getting hotter: the Middle East, the Balkans, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, the Indo-Pakistani border, South Asia, Taiwan…

Inevitably, war breaks out, and capitalism as a whole is the real culprit, despite the fact that every bourgeois regime tries to pin the blame on its adversary.

Russian imperialism must react to the capitalist economic crisis that grips it internally. US imperalism – no less decadent and worn down by the crisis – works to curb its decline as a dominant power by provoking conflicts that harm its adversaries: the emerging Chinese imperialism, as well as the old imperialisms of Europe, hiding behind the cloak of a unity that in capitalism is impossible and false.

The imperialist powers all operate on the basis of the same economic drive, as do the smaller capitalist states, which are, however, only clay pots inside iron pots.

Of Ukraine’s independence and the living conditions of its people, like those of the people of the Donbass, the bourgeois regimes on either side of the conflict don’t give a damn. The imperialist war is only a matter of the economic and political interests of the bourgeoisie: democracy, resistance, independence and anti-fascism are just lies waved on both sides of the front to fool workers into going to the front to kill and die for the interests of their exploiters.

Because, finally, the deepest historical reality of imperialist war, maturing again before our eyes, is the class struggle: war is a product of the crisis of capitalism and at the same time the only means capitalism has of surviving, at the cost of a blood sacrifice, against the working class and against communism.

The real “aggressed” in the imperialist war is not this or that capitalist state, or a front of states, but the international proletariat, the workers of the whole world, sent to be massacred to make this inhuman and reactionary mode of production survive.

But the workers, if framed in their class-based union and led by their revolutionary party, have the strength to stop the new world slaughter to which the bourgeoisie is pushing them in order to save itself.

The imperialist war for the world bourgeoisie is a matter of life and death: it must break out and be as devastating as possible, because only by destroying factories, infrastructure, cities and commodities of all kinds, including the commodity of labor-power, can capitalism restart a new cycle of accumulation. The economic growth of the 1950s and 1960s of the past century was made possible by the 50 million victims of World War II, which was also – like today’s war – imperialist on both fronts.

The watchword of the revolutionary Communist Party in the face of imperialist war is – as it was in Russia in October 1917 – revolutionary defeatism: to support and organize the refusal of the proletarian-soldiers to fight, to call for and foment fraternization with the workers of the opposite front, to call for and work for the military defeat of one’s own country.

The only way to stop the imperialist war is for the workers in one national sector of the front of a war, which will once again be world-wide, to set an example by beginning to turn their guns, not against their class brothers in different uniforms with whom they are forced to fight by their respective bourgeois governments, but against their own military command and government. For such an example will infect the whole front, all soldiers, all national armies. This was attempted in World War I, after the example set by Russian soldiers.

To do this requires an international, communist, working class party.

But it is also necessary for workers to be trained to and organized to fight for their immediate, essential needs: for wage increases, for reduction of working hours, for wages for unemployed workers.

Because these needs, and the struggle for them, unite workers above all false divisions between companies, categories, ethnicity, gender and finally nations, they are already defeatist towards the goals and interests of the bourgeoisie: more profits, more exploitation, sacrifice of workers for the sake of the company and national capitalism, war.

That is why the first step of proletarian and revolutionary defeatism in the imperialist war is to organize the struggle for the economic, essential, needs of the workers: the first step to stop the imperialist war is to refuse to pay its costs.

To this end a genuinely class-based union is needed, still absent in Italy as in all countries of the world, the result – like the weakness of the revolutionary party – of the long historical course inaugurated by the Stalinist counterrevolution, which destroyed and distorted the organization and principles of communism, condemning proletarians all over the world to the torment of another century of putrid capitalism.

In Italy, the grassroots unions have for years represented an attempt to build a class union, but divisions resulting from the opportunism of their leaderships only help the regime unions (CGIL, CISL, UIL) maintain control of the workers, which helps prevent their mobilization.

In the past year, important united actions have finally been taken: the general strike on October 11th last year and the anti-war strike on May 20th.

Faced with the serious rise in inflation eroding wages, the militants and workers of all the rank-and-file unions must fight for the organization of a united struggle – including class-based oppositions inside the CGIL – which has at its center the demand for strong wage increases.

In many countries of the world, of young as well as old capitalism – from Pakistan to the United Kingdom, from Latin America to the United States – strong strikes for wage increases are already under way.

No energy should be wasted instead in the senile and lying bourgeois electoral theater! A strike movement of hundreds of thousands of workers is able to win wage increases that will concretely improve their lives while millions of votes achieve nothing. Tens of thousands of workers framed in the revolutionary International Communist Party in the major countries of the world, at the head of a class union movement, is what will be needed to take political power away from the ruling class and give it to the working class.

Today, a united class union front to organize the struggle for wage increases next fall is the first concrete step to build a real class union and oppose the imperialist war!