The war being fought in Ukraine is a clash between imperialist powers vying for the world. Of the living conditions of the Ukrainian people, the regime in Moscow, but also those in Kiev, Europe and America, do not care: they are all bourgeois regimes interested only in the economic gains that country and the exploitation of its working class can offer them.

Ukraine’s ruling class - a crock pot among iron pots - has always been divided and doubtful whether to sell out to Moscow or Washington. Either way for it Ukrainian workers are just tools to be exploited and sent to slaughter for its own bourgeois interests.

The same, of course, is true of the Russian bourgeoisie - which sends young Russian proletarians to kill and be killed, exploits and oppresses the working class of that vast country - and in all countries: whether totalitarian, democratic or still usurping the name of socialist, as the Soviet Union already did after the Stalinist counterrevolution, in all countries the social and political reality is that of the dictatorship of capital over the working class.

That is why workers have no homeland to defend but only a political regime to be overthrown, by revolution, and a whole world to conquer, uniting above fictitious and anti-historical national boundaries. "Proletarians of the whole world unite!" is the first and ever more relevant communist watchword.

Above the contrasts of economic and - consequently - military interests, all national bourgeoisies are united by the interest that the war be fought, and toward it they push the workers, inundating them with rivers of bellicist, nationalist, partisan, resistance propaganda.

War suits the bourgeois regimes because it is the only solution to the world economic crisis-otherwise unsolvable and caused by the overproduction of goods-and because it divides and subdues the international working class, with fratricidal slaughter. The vital interest of workers around the world is to refuse to fight the imperialist war and instead fight their own social war, in defense of their living and working conditions and to free themselves from capitalism.

The war in Ukraine - the latest link in the chain of imperialist proxy conflicts that have never ceased and have first battered the Middle East, Afghanistan, Africa, and the Balkans - is a decisive step toward a third world war, to which capitalism’s global economic crisis inexorably pushes all bourgeois states and which will be inevitable if the working class, the only one capable of doing so through its mobilization, does not prevent it.

The war in Ukraine affects first and foremost the people of that country and the Ukrainian and Russian soldiers, that is, as always, largely the proletarians. But it is already affecting workers around the world as well, with its economic consequences. Already there are uprisings going on in Iran, Sri Lanka, Peru. In all countries the bourgeois regimes want to make the workers pay the costs of the war, convincing them that it is a necessary sacrifice.

Meanwhile, the bourgeoisie with the war does big business. In Italy the major industrial and financial groups - Eni, Enel, Leonardo, Fincantieri and related banks - are increasing their profits. All industrial groups owned by the Italian state, which like every bourgeois state is the first interested in the imperialist war being fought.

The first step to prevent and stop the imperialist war is to start fighting the social war of the workers, the class struggle in defense of their living conditions, not to pay the economic costs.

To the rising inflation that reduces real wages, we must respond by organizing in confrontational unionism – fighting for unity of action of the grassroots unions and of them with the confrontational areas in CGIL – to promote a general strike movement to obtain:
     - strong wage increases, greater for the worst paid categories and qualifications !
     - full wages to unemployed workers !
     - reduction of working hours for equal wages !