The imperialist war in Sarejevo

Text of leaflet distributed by the party

A massacre inflicted on the working classes by capitalist interests

The courageous strikes and public demonstrations by workers of every region and every language group in Yugoslavia haven’t managed to prevent their bourgeoisies – whether supposedly “socialist” or not – from launching the umpteenth massacre to divide up the federation; and though very much the poor cousins of their equivalents in the dominant capitalist countries, they have proved they can be every bit as bloodthirsty. It is a proxy war which the three little States are fighting on behalf of the global imperial giants, whose support and complicity, diplomatic, financial and military, is the determining factor: this is the case despite all the officially endorsed hypocrisy at the UNO and elsewhere. Germany is finally back in the Adriatic again, Italy will probably v resuscitate its “Irredentist” claims to Giuliano, and maybe even to Istria and Dalmatia – it certainly, clearly has its eyes on Albania. America, Russia, England and France scheme and manoeuvre and have gone as far as despatching expeditionary forces in defence of the Serbian advance; and all the while heaping execrations, solely for propaganda ends, on “war crimes”, despite being the worst offenders both in the past and now.

They haven’t managed, nevertheless, to get the workers to fall in behind their dirty war, and despite the racist and bellicose nonsense spread abroad by the States and the three churches, they haven’t convinced the conscripted soldiers who have therefore been confined to barracks: instead the bourgeoisies’ have had to rely on mercenary militias, composed of common criminals recruited from abroad, Americans, Russians, Italians, French, English…

The war, in fact, is so lacking in nationalism, that in order to solicit the intervention of the principal imperialists, there has been no hesitation about dropping bombs on the cities of one’s own compatriots. Bosnia is being occupied today by world capital by means of a rabble of mercenaries in an operation which aims to redraw the borders between the blocs, to the great misfortune and at the expense of the indigenous peoples.

The proletariat can rebel against the war

Bourgeois pacifism, whether institutionalised in the UNO and at a State level, or in “humanitarian” movements, always exists at times of mobilization for war in an accessory and complementary capacity. Once again it has proved that it neither can, nor seriously wishes to, avoid the periodic massacres which the capitalist mode of reproduction requires in order to ensure its perpetuation on a world scale. During peace they want a capitalism without war, in war, an imperialist war without its inseparable horrors, without deportees and concentration camps, concentration camps but without executions, executions but without torture…

In Bosnia, tensions of the general crisis of the world capitalist order are being discharged; an economic crisis which has unhinged the East already and will do the same in the West: here we see the post-war settlement between winners and losers being smashed to pieces, since it no longer corresponds to the new relations of forces. Bosnia won’t be the only area to be tormented by such catastrophic crises, unless the proletariat, at least in some of the main capitalist countries, take up arms itself, unless it is able to form its own communist militias, unless it emerges from the deep abyss of the Stalinist counter-revolution (which has survived into the present-day as a parasitic monstrosity which holds back all human social progress) and rediscovers the meaning and necessity of its own party and militia, an international and internationalist party equipped with the one programme which totally negates the capitalist system.

Deprived of its marxist communist party, the working class is defenceless even against “a few hundred armed criminals” as in Bosnia; it is “a plaything in the hands of the bourgeoisie” (Lenin). But organised around the daily defence of its working conditions, and directed by its party, the class will come into its own, and act as the midwife of a new, higher, historical epoch. It is already long overdue.

WORKERS OF ALL COUNTRIES UNITE
AGAINST THE WAR MOBILISATIONS OF CAPITAL
RISE AGAIN IN STRUGGLE AND REBUILD WORKERS’ ORGANISATIONS, UNITED WITH THE EMANCIPATNG PROGRAMME OF COMMUNISM