ICP leaflet distributed in Italy, November 24

After the collapse of false communism in the USSR – with which the Stalinist counter-revolution masked the development of Russian State capitalism from the second half of the 1920s – and in the satellite countries, subjugated by that imperialism, the bourgeoisies of the so-called countries Westerners, allied and submissive to US imperialism, had celebrated the triumph of capitalism, which from then onwards had to proceed with its peaceful and progressive economic, social and political development.

With this ideological operation, the international bourgeoisie, including the Russian and Chinese ones, had to perpetuate the lie of false socialism to deprive the proletariat of all countries of any hope of overcoming capitalism and arriving at a society without exploitation, classes, poverty, wars.

As predicted by authentic Marxism, world capitalism was instead proceeding towards an ever deeper economic crisis, which would bring more exploitation, more misery, more wars.

Military conflicts have continued to become increasingly serious: Iraq 1990, former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Afghanistan since 2001, Iraq in 2003, Syria since 2011, Ukraine since February 2022 and most recently the ongoing conflict in Gaza; to mention just the main ones.

In all these conflicts the bourgeoisies on both sides have always blamed the social and political culture of the adversary as responsible for the war.

For Western democracies, conflicts would be the product of a clash between civilisations, which would include both the Islamic world and the authoritarianism of regimes – and societies – such as the Russian one and, behind it, the Chinese.

On the opposite side of the front, the national bourgeoisies propose a mirror ideology, only reversed for their own use and consumption: wars would be a consequence of the hegemonic, militaristic and prevaricating culture of the dominant imperialism, which after the Second World War is that of the USA. Even for so-called anti-Americanism, a clash between civilizations is underway: produced by American civilization.

Giving support to these falsely pacifist ideologies of the – at the moment – weaker bourgeois front, which clashes with the dominant bourgeois front led by the USA, are also the political wreckage of the collapse of Stalin’s false communism, those parties whose falsification is come so low as to present countries such as China, North Korea and, why not, Russia itself as alternatives to capitalism, nor do they disdain to indicate regimes such as the Syrian, Iranian and movements such as Hamas as allies.

All the bourgeois parties, on one side or the other of the imperialist alignments, right or left, operate a caesura between the political world, with its results on the military level, and that of the economy. Instead, politics is nothing but a concentration of the economy and all wars are the product of economic interests, not of cultures, religions, ethnic groups, etc.

The Palestinian proletarian masses are used as cannon fodder by the Arab and Middle Eastern bourgeois regimes, by the world imperialist powers that back them and by the Palestinian bourgeoisie itself for their economic interests. Palestinian national oppression – a tragic and undeniable fact – is only a pretext for them. The proletarians of Israel themselves are being led towards the massacre of an imperialist war for the interests of their bourgeoisie and that of the United States.

The world capitalist economy is sinking deeper and deeper into a crisis of overproduction. Senile – so-called Western – capitalisms have been suffering from overproduction since the mid-1970s. World capitalism has been able to survive in recent decades thanks to capitalist development in Asia, primarily in China. But now Chinese capitalism has also entered the phase of overproduction, as the bourgeois economists themselves admit. The result is the approach of a catastrophic collapse of the world capitalist economy.

The increasingly frequent and serious conflicts, ever closer to the centers of world imperialism, are a manifestation of the deepening crisis of the capitalist economy. It is increasingly difficult for all industrial and financial groups and bourgeois States to make ends meet. They are all attacked by the crisis which is eroding profit margins. And they all become aggressors.

War – that is, the utmost barbarism – is the only solution capitalism has to its economic crisis. What brought capitalism out of the economic crisis of the 1920s and 1930s was not the Keynesian policies of State interventionism in the economy, but the Second World War, with its destruction and 60 million victims, almost all of whom were proletarians and poor farmers. Imperialist war destroys the excess goods that prevent capitalism from continuing its crazy anti-human and anti-historical capitalist accumulation, which they call growth.

But the imperialist war does not only destroy goods, factories, infrastructures, cities. It also destroys the commodity workforce, that is, millions of proletarians useless for the purposes of capital accumulation because they were made redundant by the closure of companies following the crisis or, if still employed, crushed by exploitation brought to ever higher levels.

All national bourgeoisies and their State machinery of domination are threatened, not by the economic crisis itself but, ultimately, by the revolt of the starving and exploited proletarian masses.

Above and beyond the wars for economic interests that oppose them, all the national bourgeoisies are interested in ensuring that the war is fought and that millions of proletarians are massacred in it, in order to avoid revolution and thus save their own dominion and their own privileges.

The imperialist war above the fronts is a single war against the world proletariat for the preservation of capitalism, of this society of exploitation and barbarism. War is not a political fact separate from the capitalist economy but is the inevitable consequence of a mode of production based on the exploitation of workers.

The only force that can prevent or stop war is that of the working class. This force begins to form in the fight against exploitation and leads to opposition to the greatest form of oppression which is war, the sacrifice of the very life of the proletarians for the economic interests of the bourgeoisie.

The workers’ struggle against exploitation is an anti-national struggle: less exploitation means higher wages, shorter working hours, less intense pace. This implies less competitiveness of companies and national capitalism. This is why all bourgeois parties always appeal to the good of the country: they whip the beast of burden that is the proletariat!

Just as the bourgeois and their governments of all colors today ask workers to work harder to make the company and the country win in the market competition, so tomorrow they will force workers to go to the slaughter of war, with the most suitable pretext to the purpose: democracy, the Islamic threat, the response to an attack, to a massacre.

The working class is interested in uniting to prevent workers from competing with each other with low wages and high work rates from one company to another, from one country to another. Workers must unite today across divisions between companies, sectors, territories and even between countries to resist exploitation, tomorrow to oppose war.

Only the international unity of the proletarian class can stop the war. But this unity is not an ideal, moral fact, like the false appeals for peace of the church of Rome. The unity of wage workers is the unity of the struggle and begins by declaring and practicing the struggle first and foremost against their own bourgeoisie, rejecting calls for national unity.

Even in Palestine, it is only unity between Palestinian and Israeli proletarians that will put an end to the conflict. It is only by fighting the bourgeois Palestinian parties that want a "free" Palestine from the Jordan to the sea, with the implicit massacre of millions of Israeli Jews, that the Palestinian proletarians can give the Israeli proletarians the strength to fight the parties of their bourgeoisie, which they push them to war against the Palestinians with the threat that they want their destruction.

And it is only with the struggle of the proletarians of Israel against their bourgeoisie, against its policy of segregation and anti-Palestinian ethnic cleansing, that the Palestinian proletarians can find the strength to fight the bourgeois nationalist Palestinian parties.

More generally, throughout the Arab-Middle Eastern area, the bourgeoisies use the external enemy represented by the USA-Israel combination to deflect the anger of the proletarian masses against it, and thus save their own domination and privilege. All national bourgeoisies around the world always try to divert the anger of the workers towards the external enemy.

Palestinian national oppression will end not with the formation of a Palestinian State but with the international proletarian revolution and the formation of a socialist republic comprising more and more countries in the area, in which all minorities, including the Jewish one, will be guaranteed all the rights.

Gaza reduced to rubble is not the result of hatred between peoples and religions but of the most modern and cynical bourgeois interests. It is the future that capitalism promises to most of the cities of Europe and the world.

The first slogan of communism is always the same and current, modern, just and necessary: proletarians of the whole world unite!