First of May 2014.A Hundred years after the outbreak of the First Imperialist War

Against capitalism and its preparations for a Third.
For the resumption of workers’ struggles.
For the Revolution.
For Communism

YESTERDAY

In 1914 the assassination in Sarajevo gave all the bourgeois States of Europe the pretext to launch their first imperialist war. It had been predicted two decades earlier by Frederick Engels, who warned that this armed mobilisation of millions of men would be resolved, without achieving anything, in a horrible, seemingly endless massacre.

Faithful to the line of Marx and Engels, the socialists of the extreme left – Lenin, Luxemburg and the Italian Left – immediately declared that the war was imposed by the Gods of Profit with the aim of destroying the enormous glut of commodities, which had already built up by this time, and with a directly counter-revolutionary aim: of exterminating a generation of young proletarians, who everywhere were becoming conscious of their class power and menacing the bourgeoisie’s grip on power.

Despite these warnings, in no country of Europe was the working class able to mount an effective opposition, and it was forced to march off to die in that counter-revolutionary war due to the open betrayal of the Socialist Parties, which took just a week to turn the doctrine of social class war on its head, and instead of calling on proletarians to oppose the imperialist war it called on them instead to defend whichever country they happened to ‘belong’ to, along with bourgeois militarism in general.

The reaction to this betrayal, consisting of the splitting of the old, reformist, social chauvinist traitor parties, and rise of new revolutionary, communist parties couldn’t happen in Europe until the tempestuous upheaval of the long war was over. Generous and determined workers’ uprisings, which were even armed and well organised some of them, took place in 1919, in particular in Germany and Italy. A new zenith, never before attained in terms of the party’s programmatic clarity, was reached in 1920, with convening of the Second Congress of the Third International and, in Italy, in 1921 with the foundation of the Communist Party of Italy. Fundamental staging posts these never to be abandoned by the movement in the future. But having come together too late, under extremely difficult circumstances, they didn’t succeed in giving the class effective political and revolutionary leadership, with the class in Italy, and also in Germany, defeated not by fascism but rather disarmed by the gradualism of an outdated, social-pacifist, electoralist and reformist social democracy.

Only in Russia, where a strong and disciplined Communist Party had existed since before the war,  was it possible for the class to turn the imperialist war into a civil war, to overthrow the state power and to install the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

In the other countries, the bourgeoisie, having got through the post-war crisis and hung on to power, propped itself up on a working class whose attacks had all failed. Even the communist power in Russia was feeling the pressure of the defeat in the West, and before long Lenin’s party whould degenerate, with the advent of Stalinism, into a bourgeois and nationalist party – despite its false communist label – and become the expression of a capitalist society and imperialist state in competition with other capitalist societies and imperialist states.

From then on, then, the rest of the 20^th century whould therefore be marked by counter-revolution, which only the Italian Communist Left, organised since after the Second World War in the International Communist Party, had the power to recognise, to denounce its various forms and pitfalls, and to predicting its eventual end. Outside the party, the weight of this century-long counter-revolution, and the overwhelming predominance of the bourgeoisie in every field of human affairs, firstly twisted and distorted the revolutionary Marxist doctrine, then not only blanked out its most elementary postulates at the very heart of communist party, from the collective memory, but also caused a collective amnesia about the historical goals of the working class. that is, communism and a classless society.

In the meantime capitalism continued to expand to an incredible degree, which it cannot avoid doing, aggravating all of its economic contradictions in the process, and accumulating ever more wealth at one pole and poverty at the other. Then it was hit by another crisis of overproduction in 1929, and in 1938. Once again it had to resort to world war to deal with its overblown balance sheet, bringing it back into the black by force of arms. And the Russian state, by now completely capitalist, just like all the others, hurled its proletarians into this Second Imperialist War, passing it off as “democratic”, and trampling underfoot Lenin’s communist revolutionary directive to sabotage capitalist war on all fronts and transform it into social revolution, as the socialist parties had done at the outbreak of the First World War.

TODAY

Over the course of a century, Capital, in its frenetic race for profit, has managed to cast aside every obstacle in the way of its growth and, after having penetrated into every corner of the globe, it has continued, even after the ending of colonialism,  to overthrow millenary empires and old patriarchal societies. Today its monetary insignia, with the consequent notions of Freedom (free market) and individual liberty (to sell ones labour power), are everywhere accepted as “natural”. China, notwithstanding its ‘red’ image, has the bourgeoisie at the helm of the state and is already a major capitalism, and aspires to be the greatest global imperialism of them all. The capitalism of the younger great nations is pressing on the heels of the old centres of world imperialism, which now base their power more and more on their residual financial power, and in the case of the United States on their military apparatus, and less and less on the production of surplus value and commercial domination of the world market.

Therefore in most of the world a massive revolution has taken place, with on the one side the savage destruction of the peasant class and class of small-scale producers, and on the other their transformation into wage earners, concentrated mainly in monstrous urban conglomerations. This has usually meant a certain improvement in their extremely wretched living conditions. And even the working class in the West, for a brief period following the Second World War, managed to draw some ephemeral advantages from the universal expansion of capitalism. Today, in every continent, capital finds itself face with, and will have to face up to a huge and boundless working class.

Since 2008 global capitalism has relapsed into an irresolvable crisis of overproduction and it is showing that it is unable to continue its unbridled expansion, which, perversely, is necessary for it to be able to survive. In the fight to obtain a share of the glutted markets, and to sustain the falling rate of profit, capital has to reduce its costs, in particular the cost of labour power. We are therefore witnessing a general attack on the living standards of the working class, whic is having to put up with reductions in wages, increased hours and an intensification of working rhythms, and with a consequent increase in unemployment.

In this social, political and economic war, fought out daily between the opposing classes, the proletariat is coming to realise that it is entirely defenceless: it has no trade union to organise it, and no party to lead it. In fact the majority of trade unions in all countries have accepted the bourgeois dogmas of productivity, competition between businesses, and national solidarity as their own; and the so-called workers’ parties openly boast of their patriotism and their faith in democracy, which is nothing other than a cover for the dictatorship of Capital. No-one proclaims the unconditional defence of the working class, unless ‘compatible’ with Capital. The great revival of working class combativeness and power will therefore come about as a result of the rebirth of genuine class unions, and a rediscovering the revolutionary programme, as formulated by the proponents of authentic Left Marxism and manifested in a revived World Communist Party which has made itself its living expression.

TOMORROW

The world crisis of overproduction, which six years on is showing no real signs of being resolved, is exasperating the competition between the old imperialisms, which before the productive euphoria seemed to have attenuated, and between the old and the new imperialisms. The more or less legitimate manipulations engaged in by the stock markets and financial sector tend only to re-divide among the bourgeoisie the surplus value which the workers have already produced, and these manipulations cannot, therefore, resolve the crisis but only put it off, increasing the debt held by private individuals, by the banks, and by the States, and the crisis is bound, sooner or later, to burst out again and produce new and worse financial crises.

The bourgeois governments know that only war, along with all of the huge destruction of goods and workers that it entails, can allow their mode of production to continue for another historical cycle. And they are getting ready for war. Recent evidence of this is the jostling on the military front between the USA and Russia in the Ukraine. The soldiers confronting each other, arms in hand, seems like a throwback to old Europe, the bloody cradle of capitalism, of its ideology, of its revolutions, of its first State forms, of colonialism, and of imperialism; but also, of the working class, of the great Marxist doctrine still dazzling in its originality, and of its first, though still not definitive, victories.

The crisis is first of all a bourgeois crisis, a crisis of capitalism as a mode of production, which has now exhausted any claim to being historically progressive and is merely a useless dead weight on working humanity, which is forced to work ever harder and experience ever greater insecurity only because still in thrall to the mad religion of profit.

The bourgeoisie will never renounce its wretched privileges unless it is forced to give them up. It would prefer to go to war. It is up to the global proletariat to accept the challenge: economic war to defend wages, organised in genuine class-based trade unions against economic war for the profits of the bourgeois class; revolutionary class war against the war between states, organized and led by its unitary and disciplined international communist party.

We don’t know how long the agony of the capitalist beast can be prolonged, but one thing we have learned from the events of the past century is that the revolutionary organs – the party, even if in a minority, and the trade union – must be ready and prepared well before the revolutionary crisis breaks out, so it may be recognised and put to use by the class when the time comes. This means that to work now, in the middle of the counter-revolution, towards forming the political organ defensive organs of the working class, is already Communism, is already Revolution.