Towards a general war

After years of non-stop crises, overcome only to relapse into even deeper ones, after two years of a pandemic which has contributed to block the gears of production, of transport, of the realization of surplus-value, world capitalism turns to its infernal ritual of war in order to survive. Faced with the historical and contingent failure of its mode of production, war, destroying every rule and value, resetting debts and credits to zero, is the final resource of capitalism to resolve all its slopes, its crises, and to begin again its monstrous cycle, a bath of youth.

The armed world war between capitals is already being fought today on the Ukrainian front.

It has been decided and prepared for a long time and all the states of the world are involved in it: in agreement they stir up a frenzied chauvinist propaganda and multiply the allocations for rearmament, as if what is already deadly in the world arsenals was not enough.

It still looks like a local war, by proxy, but in reality it opposes, in the old and exhausted bourgeois Europe, two imperial fronts, made of states, financial consortia, military apparatuses, centers of accumulation.

All indiscriminately bastions of counter-revolution. Because the real and only enemy of the states, of all the bourgeois states, is the working class, is the international communism that materially, in things themselves, is pressing to be born.

U.S. imperialism, which boasts of the strongest and most trained war machine, has once again gathered under its command and suddenly brought back to order the recalcitrant components of that fictitious supra-state unit that is the European Union.

But this array of thieves, which seems inspired, solid and definitive, is not necessarily so at the final test. For the bourgeoisie, the bourgeoisie of big industry and big global finance, it is important, necessary, to make war, with whom and against whom is a secondary matter. In every state the propaganda of war will meekly adapt to any reversal of the front.

That is why the Communist Party will not be moved nor will it push the international proletariat under one flag or another, nailed to the lie of defending its country, its "fatherland".

The end of the Russian empire

The end of the badly called Soviet Union - which was capitalist long before - dates from the first days of December 1991. At the end of that December, the agreement that sanctioned its dissolution was signed: Russia, Ukraine and Belarus were the signatories. From that moment on, a crucial turning point in the history of Europe began, and a more complex and deadly game between the most powerful imperialism in the West, the USA, the States of the Eastern bloc area, which were returning to their European matrix, and the Republics of the defunct USSR.

The game of the Cold War changed its rules, along with some of its players, and swept into other, wider scenarios: the chessboards of the clash between imperialisms widened. In the meantime, a new formidable competitor, China, arose and the Euro-Asian one was reduced in size.

NATO, the armed arm of the USA in Europe, which at that point should have been dissolved due to exhaustion of its functions, since the main opponent had imploded, reducing its military and political raison d’être, had instead new development, gradually incorporating the old states of the defunct Warsaw Pact. Woe to the defeated.

Ukrainian ambiguity

The process of dismemberment did not initially affect Ukraine. However, the former republic had been a black beast for the USSR and had always maintained an anti-centralist tendency in its structure, with nationalist connotations. In the initial phase of the Second World War, after the invasion of the Wehrmacht, large strata of its social body had held a cooperative attitude with the Axis forces, and often hindered the Red Army with an asymmetrical warfare "on three fronts".

This ambivalence has always characterized the Ukrainian bourgeoisie: from 2000 until 2014, pro-Russian and anti-Russian presidents alternated in government, according to the oscillations of the opportunity of the moment.

A pro-Russian president twice was elected then kicked out "by popular vote", at least according to the Western vulgate, first, in 2004 by the so-called "Orange Revolution", then in 2014 by the so-called "Euromaidan Movement", which developed from December 2013 to February 2014 that, depending on pro-Western or pro-Russian readings, has been described as a people’s insurrection or as a coup d’état by paramilitary organizations inspired and funded by the US to destabilize in a pro-Western sense an already complex and difficult situation of balance, with episodes of frenzied violence, culminating in the Odessa massacre, passed over in silence but perpetrated by Ukrainian paramilitary militias.

The Russian and Ukrainian bourgeois - called "oligarchs", as if they were different from the big and powerful bourgeois of the West - are twin brothers of the same class, even if they are, temporarily, on different sides of the front. Like the Russian and Ukrainian proletarians, forcibly forced onto enemy fronts.

The Donbass

Even in the two Ukrainian areas to the east, on the border with Russia, the so-called separatist Russian-speaking republics, there are equally bourgeois linked to their Russian brothers, and Russian-speaking proletarians oppressed by bourgeois who speak their language.

The alleged "irredentist" insurrection of those territories wanted to connote it as a national movement to be recognized as autonomous states. There was a bloody local war fought for many years. Two ceasefire agreements were drawn up between Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, under the aegis of the OSCE in Minsk in 2014 and 2015. However, the clashes never ceased.

At the end of February 2014 with a military coup Russia regained the Crimean peninsula which was incorporated into the Federation. Which for the two separatist areas of Donbass and Lugansk did not happen. There was no formal recognition of these two new republics on the Russian side either, although the arms supplies did not cease.

NATO pressure

The Ukrainian state, having undergone the amputation of Crimea, in its shiny new democratic regime born from the "popular movements" of 2014, has never ceased the violent political repressions against Russian-speaking people, but also against parties of the parliamentary arch, up to their outlawing, with the repression of any organization opposed to the government, whether legal or illegal. These are the wonders of the new democracy, similar to the West.

The Ukrainian bourgeoisie, no better than the others, has found it convenient to sell itself to the Americans. And more than that, on its way to the West, it sold the underpaid labor of its proletarians to the capitalists of Europe. Then it demanded entry into the European Union.

But above all, the American "protectors" demanded NATO membership, which, among other corruptions, would have guaranteed a bulwark against the bulky neighbor. At least these were the unspoken hopes. For the soggy bourgeoisie of Ukraine, the Western one was an obliged choice.

After all, in an official way, until 2014 NATO had a constant presence in the organization and training of the ruined Ukrainian army. It is clear that they were working on a widening of the clash from local for the separatist republics to an open and general conflict.

The presence of Western military structures is an important Atlantic outpost in Ukrainian territory, even if temporarily outside the alliance. In more recent times even making it an operational zone of NATO exercises, under the presidency of the docile former actor Zelensky (years 2020-21), provocative operations to put pressure on the Russian neighbor.

Against the proletariat in Ukraine

The proletariat, artificially distinguished into Russian speakers and Ukrainian speakers, is suffering, along with the petty bourgeoisie, also overwhelmed by economic crisis and nationalist drunkenness, all the effects of this choice of field when, at the invasion of the Russian army, the Ukrainian bourgeoisie decided on a hysterical call to arms, to resist to the last man, calling for a partisan war, a people’s war against the invader.

In reality the working class of Ukraine would have nothing to lose from an immediate surrender of its bourgeoisie in the face of the Russian invasion. Symmetrically the workers of Russia have nothing to gain from a victory of their own state in Ukraine.

But the bourgeoisie of Ukraine wanted the war, just as their Western "protectors" want it, and just as the Russian bourgeoisie wants it.

All the bourgeoisies at stake, Russian, Ukrainian and the others, are aware of and responsible for the terrifying consequences of that decision, which has shifted the theater of war to the cities, where the impossibility of identifying the front provokes indiscriminate massacres, where every building can become a point of resistance, forcing the attacker to bring death and destruction.

Horror becomes an instrument of propaganda for the side that is in defense, and for those who support it safely far from the bloody fronts. Hysterical propaganda to excite the spectacular western public, or to orient it to a war of wider proportions, to stimulate the infamous alternative "either with Putin or with Ukraine".

The internationalist task of the communists

The media fury of the West – quite similar to that of the Russian Motherland – has no equal in this war, where each of the two imperialisms attributes to the other every horror and responsibility for the slaughter.

Every war between states is a war against the proletariat, national and international, to whom go the grief, the misery, and finally the slave labor for the reconstruction of the economy of capital, within states which, victorious or defeated and dismembered, always remain the instrument of bourgeois domination.

But the war of the capitals could give to the international proletariat the opportunity to stop the bloody madness of the bourgeoisie: by destroying capitalism, in a solidary lifting of the workers of all countries.

The Party of the Revolution, therefore, denounces the imperialist war. The solution is not with any of the contending imperial parties, but against one and the other.

To the world proletariat, which today watches astonished at the unfolding of the deadly convulsions of the mode of production based on capital, we once again point out the way to its redemption: against war between states for war between classes!

This is the way, marked and certain.