May First 2017 – International Workers’ Day

In the Face of Threats of Imperialist War – Return to the Class Struggle, to October, to Communism – History repeats itself

Capitalism is leading a large part of humanity to misery not because it produces too little but because it is forced to produce too much. Just as in the Great Depression, which began in 1929, the crisis of capitalism that is currently engulfing the world from the USA to China has no way out. Capitalist accumulation slows, workers get fired, and unemployment spreads.

Because the cause of the crisis is the internal logic of capitalism itself.

The world market, which until now had managed to deal with overproduction, is becoming inaccessible to commodities from the oldest and most established capitalisms, which are repudiating previous agreements between states and returning to protectionism and customs wars. The working class is being conned by claims that a solution lies in the defense of the homeland, of the nation and its economy, or even of a particular factory.

The globalization of production, finance, trade, and labour migration, which first emerged under capitalism, creates the explosive material subverting its very existence. Wanting to stop, contain or reform this globalization is simply a reactionary illusion. The only possible negation of capital’s globalization is communist internationalism.

But capitalism cannot turn back the clocks and shut itself within national markets: in order to survive it needs to devastate the World. There can never be a capitalism without crisis and without wars. On the contrary, bourgeois states increasingly reveal the conflicts of interests which divide them and which can no longer be concealed behind diplomatic etiquette. They are already competing with weapons in the endless Syrian conflict, but they are preparing a new and third global conflict, one that will far exceed the horrendous bloodbaths of proletarians in the First and Second World Wars.

This is unavoidable: all governments, whether right or left, warlike or pacifist, will throw themselves into the furnace of war. And they will throw the proletariat in with them, since war is necessary for the self preservation of the world’s bourgeois class: in essence, war is an uprising against the working class and against communism.

Over the past few decades of capitalist peace, despite the enormous wealth accumulated by the bourgeoisie, the working class of the oldest industrialized countries has seen the withdrawal of the few scraps conceded by reformist corruption, pacifism, and conservative bourgeois “progress”, while in more recently developed countries, hundreds of millions have poured into the cities from the countryside to become industrial workers and, drilled in the tough school of capitalism, have been swallowed into the immense army of the global working class, which is called to the communist revolution by poverty and by objective historical conditions.

For its defense against the devastation of late and moribund capitalism today, and for its liberation tomorrow, the proletariat can only count on its own strength, its longstanding and unceasing tradition of struggle, and the Communist Programme, whose only guardian is the Party. A programme that is mature and now urgently needed all over the world, as the destroyer of mercantilism and wage labour.

History can repeat itself

In May one century ago, just as the imperialist First World War was tearing Europe’s proletariat to shreds, the Bolshevik Party was preparing to lead a revolution that would soon tear down the bourgeois state and its government in the name of proletarian internationalism, an end to the war, agrarian reform, and world communism.

The working class of the entire world attempted to follow that example, but was then beaten. The class wasn’t defeated by the bourgeoisie’s military but by its accomplice-the reformism infiltrated into the workers’ movement.

But the proletariat will return to make its voice heard once again. It will give itself organizations for defensive struggles, true class unions enabling it to struggle with ever longer and more determined strikes against the bosses’ oppression. It will once again start to fight for better working and living conditions, against the national economy, which is nothing other than the capitalist economy, thereby setting itself already on the road to the destruction of capital’s inhuman and obsolete laws.

This incessant battle will be a schooling in social war, whereby the proletariat will learn to recognize its own party, opposed to all the others. Through the Communist Party, the class will impose its own historical perspective on the deadly perspective of the bourgeois class and will assume the leadership of suffering humanity in its entirety through a revolutionary process that, as in Russia from 1917 to the early 1920s, will break down the power of bourgeois states to establish its own dictatorship – and ultimately lead to the abolition of wage labour, commodities, and of class-divided society.

Just as we did 100 years ago, today we reiterate that the class will oppose the inevitable wars of Capital with its slogan: Revolution!