On the announcement of the Prague internationalist conference ‘Together against capitalist wars and capitalist peace’ May 2024

‘Together against capitalist wars and capitalist peace’

Spanish

Proletarian and revolutionary internationalism is briefly specified in the following:

• All the present wars result from the division of the world into capitalist spheres of influence. The large and small states and aspiring states that participate directly or indirectly (by proxy) in these wars, including the less powerful ones, are imperialists. That is, they try to make the most of the capitalist redistribution of the world resulting from each war.
• The “defense of one’s people” and the “right of peoples to self-determination” are nothing more than the slogans with which the imperialisms call upon the workers of their countries to massacre each other for the interests of capital.
• The working class, everywhere, has no validating interest in this inter-imperialist war whose price it pays in human lives, wounded, war trauma, and increased exploitation and oppression. For the working class of all countries: the enemy is at home, (class) war to (inter-imperialist) war, there is no class peace but the continuation of the workers’ struggle until the revolution, even if it leads to the defeat of the “own” country in the war (revolutionary defeatism), the transformation of the imperialist war in the proletarian world revolution.

A characteristic feature of Marxism is that it regards the principles of the workers’ movement, of which proletarian internationalism is the most important, not as eternal and in fixed formulations but as arising in the class struggle out of the immediate and historical interests of the proletariat. As historical materialists, we apply proletarian internationalism to continuously analyze changing class relations.

Should revolutionaries unite their forces on the basis of a minimum agreement on basic positions? Yes and no.

Yes, cooperation in joint activities is possible and necessary to:

• Counter war propaganda with working class views;
• Promote the struggle against the harmful effects of the war on the living conditions of the working class by constantly explaining the connection with the war and emphasizing the perspectives of the struggle toward class autonomy;
• Support workers, deserters, communists, and revolutionaries who are victims of oppression and exclusion.

No. There is no cooperation without open discussion of the following:

• the analysis of the changing current situation;
• the historical differences between the branches of the communist labor movement that may arise in the current analysis.

What is imperialism?

For us, the era of imperialism begins with capitalism’s complete conquest of the earth, which made any war a struggle for the re-division of capitalist spheres of influence. We define imperialism as the effort of the bourgeois fractions to make the most of the capitalist redistribution of the world resulting from each current war.

Whatever the definition of imperialism, understanding the bourgeois politics we mentioned is vital to understanding the current situation because it leads to trade wars, inter-imperialist wars, and the formation of imperialist blocs. This policy of various capital groups of conflicting interests leads to inter-capitalist tensions and struggles within nations. It is resolved by the domination of certain factions over others and, often, the compensation of the latter’s losses by a share in the profits of the war economy. We see the same phenomenon on a larger scale when imperialist blocs are formed with a bloc leader.

The formation of new nations has always been the work of a bourgeoisie that uses the nation, its language, and its history to bind “its” proletariat to its capitalist class goals. The change that came with the imperialist era of capitalism is that none of these new nations was independent of major powers. At best (or even for worse), their dependence shifted to that of another great power, in most cases, in another imperialist bloc. Since the beginning of the 20th century, many new nations have been formed. Such was not ‘progressive,’ meaning they expanded the sphere of influence of capitalism as a whole. They only meant a re-division of the sphere of influence between larger nations and imperialist blocs, mostly through wars fought by poor peasants and proletarianized masses. Nor did these wars fulfill the benefits that the proletariat (the living and most important of the productive forces) would receive from them, according to the bourgeois left (and even some internationalists).

We conclude that old independence movements continue, and new ones emerge. The point is that their imperialist policies continue, trying to make the most of the re-division of the world by wars, “national” and others, and aligning with and submitting to major imperialist powers, thus being part of the global inter-imperialist confrontations and subjecting their population to these massacres, the proletariat in the front line.

Surplus population and devaluation of capital

In capitalism, the devaluation of capital is expressed in three fundamental ways:

1. In the daily process of developing productivity generated by exploiting proletarian labor, constant capital (especially machinery) becomes relatively larger than variable capital (workers’ wages).

2. In overproduction crises, where a percentage of both constant and variable capital is notoriously devalued, and with growing exploitation, surplus value grows in relation to devalued capital. This allows the rate of profit to rise.

3. Inter-imperialist war, as an unintended consequence, brings about the destruction of the constant capital and proletarians on an even accelerated scale as in crisis. However, this is a consequence of world wars, as understood by Marxists, and not a consciously intended goal of the bourgeoisie to raise its profit rate, as the CWO sometimes suggests. Imperialist war demands a war economy that ties the two essential classes to the States, favoring the exploitation rate of the proletariat.

War and peace imply harsh consequences and pressures for the working class — likewise, periods of expansion and economic crisis. No capitalism can develop without attacking the proletariat, but war obeys determinant impulses of an imperialist type, not a strategy by a national bourgeoisie or that of a bloc to destroy ‘its’ proletariat active in war production or in military service. On the contrary, each large-scale inter-imperialist war leads to enormous shortages of workers and soldiers. Of course, each bloc tries to destroy the war industry and the armies of the enemy bloc.

The warmongering militarism is generated to develop the imperialist war of the concurrent capitals in acute internationalized competition. It serves at the same time to lash out against the proletarian danger and to launch daily repression when they need it even without direct revolutionary dynamics of the proletariat, and as a support of the counterrevolutionary offensives. This is self-evident.

Herman Gorter stated that the First World War opposed imperialism as a whole against the proletariat as a whole. Therefore, imperialism made the world revolution necessary. Indeed, the imperialist capitalist war as a whole, or imperialism as a whole, brings with it the terrible consequence of eliminating numerous proletarian lives. Still, it is not launched by an individual bourgeois state or a bloc of states to “destroy the proletariat.” Each national capital needs an “industrial reserve army” as a constant pressure on the working parts of the proletariat. A national capital only wants to destroy segments of this “surplus population” when they are mobilized in war by its imperialist enemies, and it wants to maintain its eventual unemployed in uniform in the best shape for fighting. All efforts to destroy a whole people or nation, f.e. the Nazi program for the destruction of Jews, were the result of both lunatic racism and nationalist propaganda. It contradicted the urgent need for labor in the war industry. And it failed. In the same way, the efforts of the present government in Israel in its lunatic ideology of a Greater Israel – and Netanyahu’s desperate effort to escape from the trial for corruption – to eliminate or chase away the population of the Gaza Strip by destroying its infrastructure, will not only fail because it only drives the Palestine youth by hatred to terrorist organizations. This policy is also in contraction with the interests of the American bloc. To conclude, from this localized episode to a general effort of the world bourgeoisie to a global destruction of “surplus population” is misleading on the intentions of our class enemies and in its exaggeration undermining anti-war propaganda.

Struggle against totalitarianism, repression, militarization.

In the present conditions, to intervene in revolutionary internationalist defeatist terms, it is necessary to pay attention to the strong totalitarian presence of the bourgeois states, the incorporation of professional soldiers, and the enormous apparatus of ideological distortion of the masses possessed by the capitalist forces.

The acceleration of the course towards a Third World War, with two blocks delimited around the USA (NATO, EU, and allies) versus the one led by China and Russia (which seeks support from BRICS and other states that are dissatisfied with the hegemony of the block led by US capital) is a fundamental fact of enormous historical significance.

The existential and labor pressures and degradations that the proletariat suffers and will suffer, both directly and indirectly, are patent, and the response of the exploited and dominated class rests on them. The economic crises accentuate this pressure notably.

After many years of proletarian confusion and weakness, of massive subordination everywhere and in various ways to bourgeois forces, the road of proletarian independence against capital is complicated and subject to many countertendencies. Only revolutionary action and proletarian self-organization deserve to be supported, using clarification as a possible resource for such an orientation. The practical possibilities are limited but not non-existent.

The worker’s councils are fundamental, and around their power, clarification, and revolutionary dynamism must act the organizations and parties that emerge as organizational forms of minorities of revolutionary intention. The delimitation with respect to the forces, ideologies, and alibis of the bourgeois left and ultra-left is fundamental.

We will defend what always implies greater self-consciousness, independence, coordination, strength, and world unification of the working class to realize communism, confronting whatever opposes it directly or indirectly.

It is incumbent upon all revolutionaries, worthy of the name, to contribute to this development to the best of their ability with propaganda and agitation. Theoretical questions can never be an excuse to shut themselves up in their little academic world to satisfy their personal needs for mainly impractical “theory.”

In this sense, we declare that it is wrong to exclude organizations, collectives, and revolutionaries who defend the positions of the two fundamental branches of the communist left (German-Dutch and Italian). They have defended revolutionary internationalist positions in the face of imperialist wars.

Obviously, not everything is “gold in silk,” but their errors, weaknesses, and inadequacies should not be an argument for exclusion.

Aníbal and Fredo Corvo, 11-2-2024

You can contact or read us at:

• interreva98@gmail.com (Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Galician, Basque), inter-rev.foroactivo.com
• FredoCorvo@protonmail.com (English, French, German, Dutch), leftdis.wordpress.com