Capitalism offers only wars, repression, massacres and hardship!
Organizations that gathered in the international meeting in Buenos Aires on the 24th and 25th of June and signed this appeal, send out the following conclusions to the workers and youths of the world
(Partido Obrero (Argentina), New Left Current-NAR (Greece), Tendencia Internacionalista Revolucionaria -TIR–SI Cobas (Italy), SEP (Turkey), Fuerza 18 de Octubre (Chile), Agrupación Vilcapaza (Peru), Tribuna Classista(Brazil), United Front Committee for a Labor Party (UFCLP, USA), Comunistas(Cuba).
Ελληνικά-Greek version here
Let us regroup internationalist forces to fight for a revolutionary solution to capitalist barbarism
To stop the race towards the abyss, let’s organize opposition to war and the war economy!
We, the organizations that have gathered in the international meeting in Buenos Aires on the 24th and 25th of June and that sign this appeal, send out the following conclusions to the workers and youths of the world.
Two years into the war in Ukraine, the conflict between the two reactionary blocs that are confronting each other in this imperialist war is still far from being resolved. Both Putin in Russia and Zelensky’s puppet regime of Nato in Ukraine reflect capitalist interests of social and national domination.
At least 110,000 people have been killed in the war and more than half a million have been wounded. But the fighting continues bogged down. And the Western powers’ permission to use their military hardware to attack targets in Russia has been met by Putin’s response that European targets may be hit back with nuclear weapons.
Macron and other European leaders are advancing the idea of sending their own troops to the battle to prevent the collapse of the Ukrainian front, which is looking increasingly likely. Biden, Putin, Macron, Scholz and Zelensky are bringing humanity to a dynamic of actions and reactions that is drawing us closer than ever to World War III.
The millions of dollars invested by NATO, which were demanded by so-called democrats and leftists, have clearly not reinforced a reality of freedom, independence and autonomy in Ukraine, but have reinforced its economic, political and military subordination to the United States and Europe, which is the ultimate outcome of a furious clash between pro-Russia and pro-NATO Ukrainian oligarchs that, also through war, have turned Ukraine into a failed state. The recent “summit for peace and the reconstruction of Ukraine” has as its real content, rather than pursuing the profits of reconstruction (which are still far away), to push European countries to strengthen their direct commitment to the war as much as possible.
On both sides of the border repressive regimes use chauvinism and militarization to persecute those who dare to protest against this insane war and those who organize to defend the living and working conditions of the working class. Lenin’s thesis of Revolutionary defeatism is the only position that expresses opposition to the reactionary aims of both sides. A peace in the hands of Zelensky-NATO and Putin’s power group will also be at the cost of further subjugation and impositions against the two peoples. Only by rebelling against the continuation of the war and with the uprising against these governments will the Ukrainian and Russian workers be able to win their freedom from capitalist oppression and true peace.
Palestinian genocide and the trend towards regional warfare
The unsettling process of ethnic cleansing conducted by the Israeli Defense Forces in the Gaza Strip has few precedents in history. One has to go back at least to Rwanda or the Balkans, all cases that the hypocritical imperialist “international community” did not hesitate to label as war crimes against civilian populations.
The bombardment that has already dropped 75,000 bombs and shells on Gaza has destroyed cities, schools, hospitals, mosques and universities and massacred 40,000 Palestinians, to the despair of a growing mass of the world’s population moved by the genocide that Netanyahu is carrying out, financed and assisted by the USA and Western Europe. Every supposed limit that Biden spoke of, such as saying that an invasion of Rafah meant cutting off aid, has been revealed to be a lie. The large city of Rafah has also been destroyed and Western aid continues to sustain Israel. Nor have the UN votes or the rulings of the International Court of Human Rights changed the situation.
The operation, however, is not considered a success by its own executors. It has not rescued all the hostages held by the Palestinian resistance for the past eight months and, above all, it has not broken the operational capacity of this resistance, despite the widespread devastation. The continuation of the Palestinian struggle in the rubble, through the military siege that prevents the most essential humanitarian aid, fuel and energy supplies, feeds back around the world into the struggle for Palestine, through its enormous dignity and heroism.
Israel’s tendency to transform the genocide in Gaza into a regional conflict, including operations in Iran, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen, is only partially in line with the aims of US imperialism to reorganize power relations in the whole region, as was sought, in other ways, with the Abraham Accords. Undoubtedly the exchange of missiles between Israel and Iran, however limited or low-intensity it may have been, shows how close the situation is to the outbreak of a wider war. US and European forces also function as Israel’s auxiliaries in missile exchanges with Iran or clashes with the Houthis. They have limited the outbreak of an open war so far because of the limits set by US imperialism itself, fearful of the outcome of such a war. The case is that the Palestinian cause is embraced by the masses, despite the openly collaborationist attitude of most of the bourgeois political regimes in the Middle East. A generalized conflict can destabilize those same Western allies in the area.
There is no democratic, multilateral nor anti-imperialist capitalist camp.
Another point that characterizes US action, as well as the recent G7 meeting, is the preparation of hostilities with China, arming Taiwan to strengthen its defense and act as an eventual naval and military base of operations against China and forming a naval encirclement together with allied countries – first of all Japan with its accelerated rearmament plan.
These three countries, Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan, have been defined by “Genocide Joe” Biden as the central points of the international reorganization he considers necessary to guarantee “freedom and democracy”, which is a euphemism for the ailing system of international relations that has his country as its center. The domination of the United States is retreating. They have been forced to raise ever higher protectionist barriers to try to preserve what’s left of their industry and try to “Make America Great Again”. The dollar is losing strength as the world’s common currency, as expressed in the relative appreciation of gold. US debt bonds lose value. Their share of the world’s gross world product has also fallen. It has suffered political-military setbacks in points of protracted intervention such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. But, despite this, they yet remain the greatest capitalist power in the world and do not intend to give up their position as the dominant power peacefully.
The growing wars mark the tendency towards a world war. A century later, history still gives the right to the revolutionary Lenin, who saw the imperialist system as bringing a growing situation of catastrophes, wars and revolutions, and not to the reformist Kautsky, who imagined a peaceful imperialist globalization, which would overcome national tensions. The big capitalist powers are trying to find a way out of the capitalist crisis, overproduction and the fall of their rate of profit with military plunder and pillage. Military spending is at a world record. But there may still be many crises and the current configuration of forces is by no means the only one possible.
Trump, the favorite in the polls to return to the White House, favors a deal with Putin, to divide Ukraine into areas of influence and to concentrate on the conflict with China. The same is true of the far right, which has grown in the European Parliament and is incorporated by the traditional parties into parliamentary government agreements over and above the supposed “cordons sanitaires”. The United States has acted in recent years to break the European Union, welcoming Brexit Britain as a preferential partner and blowing up the Nordstream pipeline, covering up an act of war against the German industry and the German economy as a part of the war with Russia. That the presidency of the world’s leading power is once again being contested between two aging war criminals with a long history of personal corruption and who have had ample opportunity to show themselves to be enemies of their people and the world is also a physical sign of the senile and decaying character of imperialist “democracy”.
The retreat of the forces that have led the European Union for decades is a consequence of the experience the masses have accumulated. The European Union has been and is an institutional machinery for the protection of capitalist interests against proletarians of all member countries, with a bonus of oppression reserved for the weaker countries, as we saw in Greece with the debt crisis and the Troika rule imposed on Greece, which is to say, on the mass of Greek workers at the time. Today, the orientation of austerity and inflation imposed by the EU’s warmongering orientation has worn down most of the parties and governments that have promoted it. The reinforcement of imperialist pressure from France and other European powers to find a way out of their difficulties has led to new military clashes with governments who reject French colonialism in Africa, as well as a rebellion in their colony of New Caledonia. We reject the European Union as an imperialist body, but not from the point of view of “sovereignism” which promotes a more autonomous imperialist policy, but from the point of view of raising against it the struggle for workers’ governments and the international unity of workers in Europe and the whole world.
The division of the world into “democracy” and “totalitarianism” is pure propaganda. What exists is the inter-imperialist rivalry and the clashes over the division of the world in which all capitalist states take part. It is in defense of their profits that wars are fought and catastrophes are unleashed, not of ideals or values.
The fallacy of imagining the so-called “emerging” countries or BRICS as a center of international transformation against the imperialist order must be clarified. They do not constitute a homogeneous front. India is a military partner of the United States in its preparatory military actions against China, in theory its partner within the BRICS. Lula’s Brazil has shelved any plans for regional articulation at a time of extreme US pressure on Latin America.
The oligarchs of Russia and the bureaucrats of China have set up huge capitalist businesses in partnership with the imperialists of the West and their current clashes only relate to how the profits are made. To associate the capitalist powers ruled by the Chinese CP or Putin’s oligarchy with an anti-imperialist stamp or a move to a “multilateral” world of horizontal relations between nations and less national oppression is completely false. These regimes are deeply oppressive of their working classes, national minorities and neighboring nations.
The process of capitalist restoration in Cuba has not led to any economic development. On the contrary, a tremendous austerity plan is being processed against the working people, which contrasts with the privileges of bureaucrats, businessmen and the tourist industry. We oppose the US embargo and the imperialist attacks against Cuba, that cannot be an excuse for taking steps towards a capitalist economy and for oppression against the people. We support the genuine social explosions against the misery and abuses in Cuba and demand the release of the prisoners of the rebellion against hunger of July 11th, 2021.
The unity and solidarity of the peoples exploited by imperialism will not come from the hand of capitalist governments. As the oppressive capitalist governments in Latin America or the Middle East have shown, capitalism and national bourgeoisies are not capable of confronting imperialist powers nor of completing the resolution of democratic tasks. Only the socialist unity of the oppressed and the international working class can fulfill these historical duties.
Capitalist crisis, wars and anti-worker offensives
The stage of wars, anti-working class offensives and austerity policies unfolding in the world are not a modern version of the seven biblical plagues. They all have as their common origin an aggravated crisis of the capitalist system.
The capitalist crisis of 2008, centered in the United States, unlike previous crises with their epicenter in the periphery, has never been fully overcome. We are witnessing a long recession, which has only managed to establish temporary plateaus. The huge state bailouts of banks, financial funds and private companies in 2008 and 2020 left an extreme level of indebtedness in states and companies, without restoring previous levels of profit and productivity. A large part of capitalist companies in the US are zombies, with unpayable levels of debt, kept alive by a policy of state subsidies and bailouts.
This indebtedness is a root of the austerity policies against public services, pensions and wages. The same goes for the huge military spending, which is an artificial respirator that drives the capitalist economy at the expense of the state.
Economic growth and trade in the world have fallen sharply, showing a tendency towards international recession. This is in addition to the strong international inflation that precedes the war. The economic slowdown dominates the international market. Chinese economic growth, which for many years acted as a “locomotive”, is progressively deflating. The possibility of an international economic depression is exacerbated by the wider and wider resumption of protectionist policies.
Wars are the capitalist system’s method par excellence for they are capable of destroying the overproduction of commodities and the installation of surplus productive capacity on a global scale. War is the extension of state action in defense of its national bourgeoisies, through state intervention in the economy, trade wars and protectionism, to the outright plunder and control of the reconstruction of the nations it devastates.
Social polarization and political volatility
Capitalist governments of all political persuasions, whether conservative, populist, “progressive” or reactionary, are trying to unload the capitalist crisis on the living conditions of the workers. This social polarization and economic concentration has led to growing social clashes, which have even given rise to cycles of popular rebellions. We have had cycles of strong clashes in France in the suburbs of big cities, which have followed major revolts against the racist police in the United States in 2020, the Arab Spring, heroic uprisings in Iraq and Iran, and the Latin American rebellions of 2019-202. We also have phenomena of major workers’ strikes such as we have not seen for years in France, Germany, England or the United States, although they have remained on a trade union level. Recently, an extraordinary popular uprising in Kenya has managed to overturn an aggressive tax law dictated by the IMF that the government had passed in parliament.
In these successive clashes, the capacity of the political regimes and in particular the traditional bourgeois parties to govern and contain has been eroded. Few governments have been able to renew their mandates or even, in many cases, to complete them. Between rebellions, coups and the fall of governments, new forces have been put together, in many cases improvised or centered around individual candidates or outsiders. We have witnessed the rise of centre-leftists and “popular” nationalists, such as those of the successive Latin American “pink waves”, which today have a bulwark in the victory of Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico.
The decomposition of the traditional bourgeois political system has also engendered a growing movement of the ultra-right or an increasingly aggressive right, which has a strong stake in Trump’s return to the White House, in the victory of Milei in Argentina, or Meloni in Italy as well as in the results of Marine Le Pen’s party in France, which led Macron to call early elections. These forces constitute a heterogeneous bloc in terms of their economic positions and international relations. But they have two points in common, which are intimately linked.
Firstly, it is a far right that is in favor of radicalizing repressive methods to persecute and break the workers’ movement, the left and the movements of the oppressed. They do not have civilian shock troops in the style of classical fascism or Nazism, nor have they succeeded in imposing one-party regimes. But they express the tendency in capitalist democracy to generalize espionage, repression and legal persecution on a widespread scale.
Milei in Argentina is an expression of this tendency. His government wants to destroy the vanguard of the working class before it can build up a mass opposition that can defeat his government. That is why it has set up a regime of repression, espionage, legal and media persecution against the unemployed picketers’ movement, against the left and, in particular, against the Polo Obrero and the Partido Obrero. The imprisonment of the workers’ and left militants in Turkey after the May Day demonstrations, the dozens of criminal cases against SI Cobas and the unemployed workers movement “November 7th” in Italy, show that this tendency of judicial persecution against the revolutionary militants of the working class is an international phenomenon. Also in Ukraine, where the young Bogdan Sirotiuk was imprisoned by Zelensky, like many others, for calling himself a Trotskyist. We call to face this with a campaign of internationalist workers’ solidarity against every militant prosecuted or imprisoned by the state.
Secondly, all of them, including those who come directly from the Nazism and fascism of the 20th century, are fanatics of the Zionist state of Israel and the Netanyahu government that is carrying out ethnic cleansing in Gaza. The far-right parties have been the cheerleaders of the hypocritical marches “against anti-Semitism” that seek to intimidate the movement that opposes Zionist genocide in the world.
The two aspects are linked. Israel is the expression in itself of absolute reaction. It is the vanguard of imperialism. And, in its violent actions against internal dissent and the Palestinian people, it is the model to be emulated by all the little candidates for dictators. It is no coincidence that Milei closed his election campaign waving an Israeli flag. It is enlightening that the main supporter of this exemplary military action of the ultra-right in the world is at this moment the “democrat” and “progressive” wing of the US imperialist bourgeoisie with Biden.
The undisguised concentrated reactionary character of the genocide in Gaza has also generated the opposite reaction. The struggle against the genocide in Palestine has been taken up by sections of the youth and working class in dozens of countries in a radicalized mass movement not seen in decades. Major workers’ actions have been carried out to hinder NATO’s military operations in Ukraine and Palestine. The extent of the occupation of universities in USA in support of Palestine is similar to that of the anti-Vietnam War movement in 1968 and it has spread to sections of the trade union movement, which was not the case in the past.
Given the historical experience that is behind us, it is a terrible and unjustifiable mistake to use the threat of the ultra-right to revive fronts of class collaboration with the “democratic” bourgeoisie under the excuse of “confronting fascism”. So-called “progressives” has proved powerless to stop the ultra-right; it has ended up sheltering it and giving in to it, paving the way for its progress and its access to power. We do not ignore the rise of the ultra-right and fascist currents, even within the United States with the backing of fascist formations and sectors of the bourgeoisie. But fascism, wherever it might re-emerge, can only be defeated by the united front of the working class and popular organizations of the oppressed masses. With strikes, mass demonstrations and unity in struggle. The recent attempted coup d’ etat in Bolivia shows that the only tool at our disposal to smash these offensives is the call to general strike and the independent mobilization of the working class. The disaster and the regression of living conditions brought about by the “democratic” variants of bourgeois rule are the ones that generate the rise of the ultra-right, they are not the means to defeat it.
The formation of a New Popular Front in France, which revives the old formula of class-collaborationist fronts, is a new proposal to tie the workers’ and youth reaction against the far right to the old reformist and parliamentary apparatuses on a nationalist and chauvinist political perspective. The New Popular Front is formed “against Le Pen” and as such implicitly aims to compete with Macron to see which of the two blocs places the prime minister and to form a government together. Precisely when Le Pen has been able to channel the wear and tear of a regime of austerity, attacks on workers, pensioners, immigrants and the promotion of imperialist war. The way to bury the ultra-right is to organize workers independently of the state, not to promote their following of social democracy and the traditional parties that have been the permanent backbone of the European Union of imperialism, austerity, war and NATO.
Regrouping the revolutionary and internationalist left
The barbarism generated by this stage of decadent capitalism is by no means limited to state repression, wars and poverty. The search for capitalist profit in other areas in the face of stagnating productivity transforms drug trafficking, prostitution and human trafficking into major industries, with disastrous social consequences. Racism, the double oppression of women in their character of both women and workers, and persecution of the LGBTQ collective reappear virulently as the ideology of the defense of the privileges of the ruling classes, and the capitalist status quo threatened by its crises. We support the struggles of working women and the LGBTQ collective for their labor and civil rights, and real equality.
The anarchic organization of production on the basis of competing corporate profits instead of planning for the common good is the framework for the development of global warming and other expressions of the environmental disaster that this social system is generating. Millions live without the basic conditions of urbanization, transport and hygiene that the development of humanity makes possible and that a planned economy would make available to all.
But in the face of this dystopian present, the whole history of the working class movement, the scientific analysis of reality and a balance sheet of our international experience of struggle gives us a revolutionary optimism that strengthens and sustains us in the struggle. The strength of the working class and the exploited is breaking through, rising up against the conditions of exploitation and the governments of its class enemies. It expresses the historical necessity to overcome an unbearable situation.
In these years thousands have come out to fight on the streets, in rebellions and mass movements. In France we witnessed the most important general strike since 1936. The mass mobilizations for George Floyd in the United States in 2020 or those that overthrew Mubarak in Egypt are among the most massive movements of struggle in the history of humanity. Thousands of others have sought to change the system by supporting political forces that speak in the name of “socialism”. The leaderships of the system-integrated left, together with those of the state-integrated trade union bureaucracy, have played a systematic role in demobilizing and integrating into the political regime the rebelliousness and demands for social transformation and even revolution of these thousands of youth and workers. DSA in the United States, Boric in Chile, Petro in Colombia, among many others, have served to channel these yearnings for transformation into the system, co-opting organizations of struggle and bringing bitter frustrations to these experiences of rebellion.
This process of integration into the state has taken a new leap just when the capitalist catastrophe is laid bare in the face of millions, with the extension of the imperialist wars of plunder.
In 2022, a large part of the organizations claiming to be revolutionary took a position of embracing one of the reactionary sides in the conflict in the face of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Covered by the lie that the troops organized by NATO could be compatible with a fight for “autonomy” or “national independence”, they constituted a left leg of the West’s military campaign to penetrate Eastern Europe, as a variant of its campaign of democratic justifications. Some fantasize about a “dual” war that is on the one hand imperialist and led by NATO, which they do not support, and on the other hand of national liberation, which they do support. But such duality exists only in their heads. Zelensky’s regime is as independent from NATO as South Vietnam was from the Western powers. On the other hand, another section of the left used campist arguments to support the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which clearly has no progressive goal.
In 2023 the uprising of the Palestinian resistance and the subsequent start of the genocide in the Gaza Strip, which generated a significant mass reaction around the world, however, also failed to be met with a homogeneous response even among the left. There are those who responded with pacifism, and distanced themselves from the Palestinian resistance, even among those who demand a ceasefire and an end to the bombing.
It is a profound mistake to refuse to give support to an oppressed people and its organizations when they clash with imperialism and its enclave, the Zionist state, by excusing oneself in name of the profound strategic and programmatic differences that separate revolutionaries from religious or nationalist organizations. Where there is a national struggle, as there undoubtedly is in Palestine, revolutionaries can fight for the leadership of that struggle, to lead it to victory with a socialist strategy, only on the basis of full participation in all stages of the struggle. However, revolutionaries always maintain their independence from the dominant class and use openly socialist propaganda to be able to be an alternative for the oppressed peoples, instead of the hypocrisy of the reactionary Islamist and nationalist leaders of the Middle East. We internationalists are a part of a general movement and choose the side of the oppressed people and their right to defend themselves with all the means at their disposal to wage that struggle, against imperialism and their spawns.
In terms of unconditional support for the Palestinian resistance, very many left organizations have been to the right of the thousands of students occupying the universities against genocide. And even among the organizations most sympathetic to Palestine, very few understand how decisive the general uprising of the exploited masses of the Arab and Middle Eastern world is for the victory of the Palestinian cause.
These multiple contradictions have continued to increase fragmentation in the camp of the far left. There are even those who support Zelensky and at the same time condemn Netanyahu, pretending to ignore the explicit common thread linking the two military undertakings supported by NATO, whose budget items are jointly discussed in the parliaments and summits of the imperialist countries.
We need a tool of the working class to fight for a revolutionary strategy that can lead our struggles, our next rebellions, to victory. We need a working class force that can counteract the violent campaign of brutalization, and chauvinism with which the bourgeoisie wants to intoxicate peoples.
We have been meeting, discussing, taking resolutions and common initiatives, practicing proletarian solidarity, among a growing number of organizations which, even with political differences and coming from different traditions, recognize ourselves in a common field of internationalism and independence in the face of the central political problems of the stage. We can continue to advance in this practice of unity in order to make a leap forward in the regroupment of internationalists. We will undoubtedly be making a contribution to building the workers parties of action and the revolutionary international that we need to be able to transform our struggles into victories.
– Stop the NATO-Russia war in Ukraine! The enemy is at home! Unity of the workers on both sides of the border. Down with the governments responsible for the war!
– Stop the genocide in Gaza, Free Palestine! Support Palestinian resistance! Stop national, racial, ethnic and religious oppression everywhere! For an international labor boycott of Israel.
– Freedom for political prisoners in all countries! Stop the persecution of the labor movement, the left and anti-war movements.
– No to the arms race and the war economy! Free health and education for all!
– Against anti-worker labor and pension reforms!
– For a sliding scale of wages to prevent inflation from destroying our living conditions.
– Nationalization under workers’ control of industries that close down or carry out massive lay-offs. Sharing of working hours without affecting wages. Work less, everybody work!
-Down with the imperialist European Union. No to nationalist sovereignism. For the confraternization of the workers of Europe, including Russia, against imperialist war.
– No to imperialist interference in Sudan, Congo and everywhere! We condemn the French colonialist interference in West Africa, and all interference of big powers in the continent.
-Independence of Puerto Rico, New Caledonia and all colonial territories.
– No to the oppression of the Kurds! For the right to self-determination of all oppressed peoples!
–Down with the reactionary dictators in Middle East! Class struggle against racial and religious bloodshed! Long live the Socialist Middle East!
– Down with chauvinist nationalism and xenophobia! Working-class internationalism!
– For a society without exploitation and war, of harmony between human and nature!
– For workers’ governments, social anti-capitalist revolution and international socialism.
Proletarians of all countries and oppressed of the world, let us unite!
TΙR
NAR
SEP
PO
F18
UFCLP
Tribuna Classsista
Comunistas
Agrupacion Vilcapaza
SICOBAS
Μήνυμα ελπίδας και αγώνα από την αντικαπιταλιστική συνάντηση στο Μπουένος Άιρες
