The international working class is today facing what is the highest form of its oppression in capitalism: the imperialist war.

It is clear that the war in Ukraine is not just a war waged solely between the Russian and Ukrainian bourgeois states but also involves all of the major imperialist powers: the USA, China, Germany, France, Britain, Italy, etc. The permanent confrontation between imperialisms which brought war to the Ukraine, just as it devastated the Balkans, Central Asia and the Middle East in recent years, is still sweeping over many other “hidden” regions, or rather, countries overlooked by the capitalist regime’s media.

The fact that the war is approaching the heart of one of the centers of world imperialism – Europe – indicates that the Ukraine conflict is a decisive step towards the third world war. An outcome which the capitalist world needs in order to overcome its internal contradictions.

War is an economic necessity of capitalism. It’s the military continuation of the competition between capitals, between the large economic interests protected by competing bourgeois states. It is a bitter competition which becomes more and more ruthless with the advance of the world economic crisis of overproduction.

The defense of democracy from autocracy, of anti-fascism, or the defense of Ukrainian nationality or Russian minorities, are all propaganda and hypocritical justifications to hide the real interests of the capitalist blocs. They also serve as encouragement for workers to become cannon fodder (on both sides).

All bourgeois parties are responsible for the conflict because it is provoked by capitalism as a whole. Even if a cease-fire in Ukraine and a perilous peace are achieved, war will continue. There are no bourgeois policies or reforms which can prevent the system from rotting and combusting.

The capitalist States are driven to ever greater aggression by the inexorable advance of the world economic crisis: they are all confronted by the historical decline of capitalism, whose defense at any cost – whether in destroying goods and lives or devastating nature – is the raison d’être of the national state machines and their formidable military apparatuses.

Imperialist war is not a legacy of a the past entrenched in only some of the particularly regressive regimes. It is the product of the most modern and immense economic interests. Capitalism itself is an anti-historical society, which survives on itself, and which opposes by all means the movement of communism – international and not mercantile – which is pressing to be born from within, and is already materially mature. And it opposes it by oppressing the social class which, unconsciously, by the mere fact of having to fight for its survival against this dying world, is its carrier: the proletariat.

The imperialist war between states is a mechanism for the partition of the world market, and is at the same time a bloodletting that capitalism requires in an attempt to heal itself of the cancer of overproduction, which, like all cancers left to fester, condemns it to death: it destroys cities, factories, infrastructure and an enormous surplus of goods – including labor – which flood the market, preventing the further accumulation of capital.

All capitalist States are united – beyond their differences – in wanting war, and for workers to fight and die in it. The real enemy of every bourgeois nation-state is not their rival power, but the proletariat that refuses to fight at the orders of its class enemy! That is why in all countries the regime media exalt nationalism, militarism, patriotism, national solidarity and partisanship.

The imperialist war is therefore an instrument to stop the approaching revolution. Conversely, stopping the war means paving the way for revolution.

The economic crisis immiserates the workers and increases our exploitation. It pushes for a return to class struggle. The crisis has found expression in the social uprisings of recent years, from the so-called Arab Springs, to those in Chile, Ecuador and Colombia, and most recently at the beginning of the year in Kazakhstan, which was bloodily suppressed with the consent of all the bourgeois states of the West and East, democratic and autocratic. The persistent increase in strikes the last few years in the United States reminds us that the social crisis, which began by hitting the capitalistically weaker countries first, will come to set in motion the struggle of workers in all imperialist countries.

Only the mobilization of the working class – not a vague pacifist-minded movement – can stop the war, in a de facto defeatist attitude, which denies any national unity between the exploited class and the bourgeois class, and instead seeks workers’ class unity beyond the borders of war.

A strong movement of strikes in every factory and workplace, in defense of improvements in the conditions of the workers’ lives and work, will generate social and political conditions more favorable so that among the proletarians forced to wear a military uniform and fight, discipline is broken and fraternization is spread across lines of the war front, that is, among proletarians otherwise forced to kill one another. The first step towards proletarian unity and revolutionary defeatism in the bourgeois war lies in the elementary refusal of the workers to bear the sacrifices demanded of them by nationalism.

In recent days the states of Europe, with the total consent of their parliaments, have approved a staggering increase in military spending, which will fall on the working class, while the increase in utilities and food will eat up a substantial part of wages.

It is the inescapable duty of class unionism to organize the struggle of the workers to defend themselves from the effects of war, the consequences of which are already felt.

Instead, in the face of a historical fact of this gravity and the tasks that it imposes, the conduct of the leadership of the fighting unions has so far been in default. A month after the beginning of the war, there has still not been organized, nor is there any trace of willingness to promote a united mobilization by the fighting base unions. On the contrary, the leaderships of the major grassroots unions are persevering in their usual opportunistic conduct while continuing to ignore each other.

We need to create unions with combative readiness, doing so will multiply their strength and value by their will, constantly expressed and put into practice, to put it to use in the workplace struggle but also in the service of the working class as a whole.

In Italy workers sought unity with the struggles of other workers, regardless of which union the others were organized in, thereby taking a practical step in the direction of the unified class union front which is necessary to both put the workers’ movement back on its feet, as well as to defeat the regime unionism of the CGIL, CISL and UIL; these are unions that, with their defeatism within the workers’ struggle, have hamstrung workers in the face ofkk bourgeois aggression.

In the face of the imperialist war, the most militant of workers must continue to expand the struggle for unity of action, in order to achieve as soon as possible a united general strike of all the fighting unions against the imperialist war and its effects on the working class, for a general increase in wages, unemployment benefits, redundancy pay and pensions. We need to have the ability to promote an international general strike against the war.

It will be up to the workers and militant union fighters to stand and fight so that the combative trade union organizations act concertedly, without wasting any more time, to defend the working class from the imperialist war, to firmly demand the end of the war before it spreads to other countries!

War against War!

Against imperialist war, for the war between the classes!

For the united class union front!

For the united general strike of all combative unions against the war!