Rather than to rewrite for the umpteenth time a specific text on this important issue, we decided urgently to publish a bulletin containing the essential passages of two texts released a few years ago but which have not lost any of their “current” character.
On April 14th, 2018, the big bourgeois media (which express and materialize the class interests of our exploiters and oppressors, all factions taken into account despite the conjuncture divergences that differentiate them from each other) announced to us with great blows of war propaganda that a coalition of three among the world’s largest powers (the US, Britain and France) have conducted night airstrikes on various “strategic” targets in Syria, in retaliation for the chemical attack allegedly perpetrated by the Baathist regime, supported militarily, economically, politically and diplomatically by Russia and Iran. It is quite“comical” and “outrageous” that these capitalist gangsters put forward the defence of “civilian populations”, victims of the morbid logic that leads this world, especially when we know very well that for example the US have the most powerful military-industrial complex of the planet, as well as the most gigantic reserves of weapons of mass destruction. The US have in recent years not only contaminated whole regions of the former Yugoslavia and Iraq with widespread use of “depleted uranium” ammunition, causing a drastic increase in the number of cancers for local populations, but they also sacrificed their own soldiers exposed to the devastating effects of such weapons.
Once again, on that occasion, the spectre of a third world war was brandished in front of the astonished eyes of billions of proletarians, by putting forward the possibility of a US-Russian military conflagration. It seems obvious to all healthy and somewhat critical minds that the official version to be used as a justification for these airstrikes does not hold water and is meaningless. Neither American, British and French capitalists nor the Russian, Syrian or Iranian capitalists certainly give a damn about the fate of proletarians crushed under floods of bombs, missiles, bullets, gas and others merry gimmicks produced by the capitalist Eden. The fundamental reason for all this performance is the ideological, psychological preparation of the masses of proletarians atomized in their condition of citizens to the future and inevitable reality of generalized war.
Rather than to rewrite for the umpteenth time a specific text on this important issue, we decided urgently to publish a bulletin containing the essential passages of two texts released a few years ago but which have not lost any of their “current” character. So let’s start with the text “Airstrikes Threats On Syria! Third World War? No War But The Class War!”, published in September 2013 after a first major chemical attack in Syria:
More than 110,000 dead, two million of refugees in nearby countries, more than three million internally displaced, 130,000 arrested or missing, tons of bombs, missiles, shells, cluster bombs… This is the reality of war in Syria since two and a half years! [Since then, today in 2018, these morbid figures have obviously rocketed!]
And as if this materialization of permanent war of capitalism against the proletariat was not enough, the mainstream bourgeois media announced us on August 21st[2013]the “ultimate horror”: chemical weapons were used in a suburb of Damascus, killing more than 1,300 people, some 3,600 others were wounded.
The Syrian regime is accused of this, and it’s true that it would not be its first slaughter since it had already proven what it is able to do in terms of repression. Others accuse groups of “rebels”, and more precisely jihadists militarily supported by Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
We, the communists, do not want to enter in any way into this debate, and even less to endorse the ravings of “conspiracy theories”, very fashionable in some “militant” and “ultra-leftist” circles. Because fundamentally, whether it was the capitalist State in Syria represented by the Ba’ath regime who did it or it was done by one of the fighting factions of the bourgeois “opposition” with the support of regional and international powers, it is ultimately State terrorism, the capitalists’ terrorist State, which is responsible for this antihuman and anti-proletarian gassing, as it is responsible for all this war, as for any war…
But today, when capitalism is facing its worst crisis of valorisation since the end of the second world slaughter, its only alternative is once again the mass destruction of surplus productive forces (of commodities, dead labour, but also of labour force commodities, thus of living labour, thus of proletarians!)… The only viable solution for capitalism (to boost subsequently a new cycle of valorisation) is therefore a generalized war […]. Its only problem (which is a major problem!) is how to mobilize the proletariat all over the world so to recruit it in whatever ideological campaign to justify the massacres to come.
Present war drum roll announcing a military intervention of some Western powers in Syria partakes in this ideological campaign. Especially since Syria is in the heart of a region which is a geostrategic issue of capitalists’ voracious appetites. Two major constellations of States already share the ground and participate in the reorganization of the region: on one hand Russia, China and Iran, which support the current regime (but to which extent this support won’t threaten the whole of their interests?), and on the other hand the U.S.A., France, Great Britain and their regional allies Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar…
Threat of military intervention strengthens this polarization and also backs up in their analysis the public opinion, bourgeois propaganda, “experts” of the question, and even groups and organizations which claim social revolution, anti-capitalist struggle, proletarian insurrection, struggle for communism and/or anarchy, all of them continually repeating ad nauseam[…] that the events in Syria is nothing but a proxy war (between these various State powers), or at least a civil war between two bourgeois camps (with the support of these same State powers): Ba’ath regime against “democratic opposition” (which in some cases is reduced to its simplest jihadist expression)…
However, this version and grasping of history, and therefore of the facts taking place in front of our eyes, although it covers a part of the reality on the ground, purely and simply eliminates another aspect of this social matter in motion, which is essential for us communists: the class struggle which had sparked off what has been going on now. In March 2011, a significant movement of struggle, an uprising of a proletarian nature, against poverty, against the rising of prices, against unemployment, against the drastic austerity measures imposed during the previous decade in Syria, against repression, broke out… Since the beginning proletarians have tried to go beyond spontaneity of the movement, various structuring of struggle have been set up, among others hundreds of coordinating committees (Tansiqyat) that try to respond in the practice to needs of the struggle, its organization on the ground, its coordination, its centralization, its consolidation, its spreading and its self-defence, although they develop very contradictory levels of radicalism as for the perspectives of the struggle. Very quickly also the movement of our class countered State terror with direct action, encouraging defeatism within the central apparatuses of repression…
Because of lack of developing its perspectives, because of lack of revolutionary direction, and under the influence of the direction given by different bourgeois factions, who try to achieve their own interests while taking profit of the proletarian struggle, this class struggle, this class war, partially turned into an inter-bourgeois struggle, into an internal civil war and into a proxy war. This doesn’t in any way detract from the importance of the fundamental proletarian nature of the movement. Always and everywhere in the history where the both antagonistic classes clashed, bourgeois factions either temporarily united against a common enemy or they continued to oppose each other so that only one strong counterrevolutionary pole emerges, able to defeat the class historically determined to put an end to this age-old nightmare that is capitalism and its social relation (as the insurgent proletariat in Commune of Paris, Russia, Germany, Spain… tried to do). Everywhere and always in this same history, “foreign powers” intervened either to directly suppress the movement of our class (operations of international gendarmerie) or to support a bourgeois camp against another (e.g. “Russian Civil War” from 1918 to 1921 during which various Western armies militarily supported the “Whites” against the “Reds”) or even to wage a proxy war (Spain 1936-1939)… And it will be like this in all future conflicts which will set the world of value ablaze till its violent abolition by force of social revolution.
Let’s come back to Syria and recall what we wrote […] in another text: “there is no doubt that the bombing of cities and the massacres, the terrible State repression and its militarization, represent a nagging strength that tries to recruit proletarians in struggle (…) for one or the other bourgeois factions opposing each other in the attempt to conquer the power and the management of social antagonism. All the international and regional State powers (…) push the class confrontation to militarization, in order to make it losing its dynamics of subversion of this world of misery, in brief to deprive the proletariat of its class autonomy… The third camp in Syria (that is to say the proletariat opposed to both poles of the counterrevolution) is on the road to ruin and to be recruited if isolation which it is plunged in is not broken, if the universal content of its struggle (which appears in all the struggles of our class) is not put forward, if it doesn’t quickly find an echo to its struggles, if new insurrectional hotbeds don’t develop elsewhere in order to not give a single moment of rest to the voracious bourgeois anymore…”
Every movement of struggle and subversion of social relations in history has its own dynamics, which, if it doesn’t grow, if it doesn’t expand, then fades away and finally withers away. Certainly […], the dynamics of the struggle movement of our class in Syria runs out of steam, on one hand because of simultaneous thrusts of bombings, killings, massacres, imprisonments, on the other hand because of the action of various reformist policies that use the proletarians as cannon fodder in their war between bourgeois factions, but also because of the influence of jihadist tendencies that are turning the class war into a sectarian war, despite the strong resistance of the proletariat.
This resistance of the proletariat to the various jihadist factions trying to confiscate our struggle and to force the restoring of law and order (among other things through moral and religious order) in the “liberated zones” […] expressed itself […], through a series of actions that the bourgeois media obviously ignored. […]
To all fighting proletarians in Syria!
Finally, we want to warn the proletarians in struggle in Syria who are on their knees while suffering endless bombings and massacres orchestrated by the current regime, and who yet develop illusions about an intervention of the “international community” (which is nothing but a bunch of capitalist gangsters), who call for airstrikes or a “no-fly zone”… There is nothing to expect from any State power, all of them have always fought and suppressed proletarian revolts in history. Whether in Indochina and Algeria during the fifties or in Vietnam later, the French and American armies left the battlefield with piles of corpses… Whether in Iraq, Somalia, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, or very recently in Libya, whether on the pretext of “war on terror” or “humanitarian relief”, the imperialist issues meant nothing but a reorganization of exploitation and the replacement of a dictator by another or by a bunch of more presentable and more “respectable” torturers… No, there is nothing to expect for the development of our struggles while choosing a “lesser evil” against a “worse”… [And this is as well valid for proletarians in Rojava who imagine that the national-social-liberationist organizations that frame and transform them into cannon fodder can assume in the current confrontation a different role than that of mercenaries on the ground of great capitalist powers.]
To all fighting proletarians in Syria!
In the beginning you revolted against misery and repression imposed on you by a particular faction (Ba’ath regime) of ruling class. But too many of you have made yourselves the auxiliaries of another bourgeois faction of managers of capitalism while participating in the war, on the side of the united front of nationalism and sectarianism. You are told, our enemies would like to make you believe, that this war “against Assad” is not like any other one. All representatives and tendencies of “anti-Assad” united front whisper to you to tactically postpone attack against capitalist propertied class, existing social relations and present state of things, until “devilish” Assad is defeated. While accepting this, you don’t side with the proletariat, but against it. Your allies are no longer the proletarians, all exploited, but the bourgeoisie. Supporting united front means to fight for someone else, and being an extreme expression of sectarian and nationalist rivalry.
The perspective of an attack against capitalist misery and bloodshed in this war, which has never been so compelling, depends on the ability to make apparent the frontier that exists between action and need of the proletarian class on one hand and the camp of the bourgeoisie, that of its democratic dictatorship, on the other hand. Not to point out this frontier means to underestimate historical role of the proletariat, but particularly to fail in assuming the important and fundamental role of its vanguard in the struggle. Capitalism is war, war is capitalism. At war as in peace, there is still capitalist profit, exploiters and exploited.
Refuse any united front in favour of one bourgeois faction or another! Stop this war of one bourgeois military apparatus against another. Turn your arms against your “own” officers, political sharks, foreign military advisers and capitalist bosses of your “own” camp. Be vanguard and show to “proletarians in uniforms” in ranks of Assad forces that there’s only one unity, that of exploited beyond the artificial frontiers of capitalism. Spread this method of our class action behind the front of your “enemy” soldiers to join you in executing bourgeois imperialist butchers who are the only to profit from this massacre.
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We didn’t yet have the time to complete the international distribution of this text and to discuss in detail the ins and outs of it and a new centre of tensions between imperialist powers was already developing, this time in Europe. In the spring of 2014, we published two texts on the events in Ukraine, including this one: “War preparations between Ukraine and Russia. Show or reality?”, which addresses and develops the same themes and highlights the perspectives for our class as well as for its most determined minorities in terms of organization of revolutionary defeatism:
[…] Rumours of war resound noisily in Europe again, cannons are loaded, fighter-bombers are packed with murderous bullets and bombs, missiles point their nuclear warheads at their future objectives: after wars that caused unrest locally and according to circumstances in Yugoslavia, Georgia, Chechnya, Dagestan, Ossetia etc. during this last quarter of century, preconditions for a new war have been intensively maturing in the Ukraine now, a war much more extensive and with unimaginable international effects.
Since four months the Ukraine has been shaken by an important unrest emerging from the fertile soil of underlying contradictions that determine any class society and their concrete expressions: starvation wages, restructuring, layoffs, privatizations, cuts in social security that was a hangover from “the socialist era” etc. Of course these social movements (like all the struggles that develop nowadays) yet carry the seal of the lack of rupture with the managers of the social relation, as well as with their substitutes to come. Their political expression and consciousness seem to be so weak and false... But revolutionaries cannot just brush off the content of the events in a disdainful and patronizing manner. […]
Despite the bourgeois nature of various expressions and materializations issuing from the social movements, what the class of capitalists fears the most nowadays is an extension of the unrest to very metropolises of World’s super-powers. What would happen if similar events broke out in the Federation of Russia, Britain, USA or China? Capitalists would prefer to avoid, to say the least, this kind of “catastrophe” for the durability of their social dictatorship and they thus try to preventively channel all this whirlpool energy, all this social maelstrom into the ruts of war. […]
Once again capitalists get ready to send us to the massacre
This year 2014 the bourgeoisie commemorates the triggering off the First World War, while pretending that we are now living in a world of peace and harmony. […]but as in 1914 politico-military mechanisms are setting in motion, mechanisms that can easily get off the stranglehold of sorcerer’s apprentices who manages the world. […]
Beyond the development of the nationalist, chauvinist and patriotic hysteria in both opposing camps, and besides the particular circumstances that nourish the present preparations of war between the Ukraine and Russia, we have to highlight a fundamental point: the speed with which all this crisis has grown. Indeed, a few days or weeks were enough to reveal all the contradictions accumulated since the end of the “bipolar world” (the USSR against the USA, the East against the West, “communism” against “capitalism” according to both sides’ propaganda), i.e. since a quarter of century. All contradictions coming from the non-resolution of the historical crisis inherent to capitalism (considered as what it is basically, that is to say a global social relation) and that it is carrying in its womb; crisis that resulted from the new cycle of valorisation developed on the ruins of the previous World War. As the capitalist order detests vacuum, since the collapse of one of both imperialist blocs was an expression of such a vacuum, “order” begins to be restored with the re-bipolarization of the world, so much needed to the competition between the different factions of capital but also to the implementation of the objective conditions for a new war. We can therefore claim that history is accelerating! […]
We must also recall here the fundamental essence of war. Since the capitalist mode of production exists and therefore rules the whole planet, all wars are bourgeois, capitalist; beyond the ideologies for which capital pretends to wage them, all wars are wars against the proletariat, they are counterrevolutionary wars.
Beyond the inter-imperialist rivalries, it is always the devalorisation, the fall in the rate of profit which leads to a generalized overproduction of commodities and therefore also an overpopulation, what is the reason for bourgeois war. Even if according to the bourgeoisie’s own consciousness, the issue of the war is especially about destroying the enemy, in reality its main goal has always been the same in the past as well as now: i.e. the massive destruction of human beings nowadays turned by capitalism into surplus commodities.
To wage its wars, the bourgeoisie must eliminate the proletariat as a class, that is to say as an active force, to dissolve it into the people, and then recruit these citizens among other citizens under any flag hiding the hideous face of capitalism: the flag of antifascism or fascism, in the name of progress or reaction, in the name of “democracy” or a “new order”, the flag of the conquest of a vital space or the national liberation, of the defence of civilized West or anti-colonialism,... It’s always in the name of peace, freedom, democracy, socialism... that cadavers are piling up, that civilians as well as militaries are mutilated with cluster bombs, or that they are dying in concentration camps.
Communist action against capitalist war and peace
No matter finally how the current crisis […] will be resolved, because whatever it turns into – a local war, a regional war, or even a generalized war, or even if it doesn’t go further than the permanent war daily imposed by capitalism to the whole humanity, our reply is since centuries always and invariably the same. Internationalism is a proletarian answer to the bourgeois attacks and it means to break the social peace, the peace of capital, to develop our struggles there where we stand, against our direct exploiters everywhere in the world. We prepare our solution to the bourgeois crisis: the worldwide social revolution, while answering a blow for a blow to the deteriorations of our living conditions. It’s the only way to struggle against the bourgeois solution that is the generalized war.
And we would like here to criticize the pacifist and resigning positions articulated in some militant expressions formally claiming to belong to the camp of the anti-capitalist struggle which […] put forward the overused argumentation, used by Social democracy one thousand times, and one thousand times denounced by revolutionaries, according to which “capitalist war is terrain which is particularly hostile to the emergence of the proletariat as a class for itself”. Of course, we don’t take delight in the preparations of a new war orgy, but faced with this ineluctable or even unavoidable capitalist necessity, we refuse to sink into puerile snivelling. Historically, the Social Democrats always adored and praised the “linear progress” of the social movement, without a hitch, without a rupture, “progress” that would lead us peacefully to the “big night” of the proletarian new Eden. But the reality of the capitalist hell shows us other ways and we call proletarians in struggle not to capitulate and not to tie themselves up in paralyzing illusions. On the contrary we call upon them to give a new impetus to their action thanks to the new material conditions produced by the war and so to assume their responsibilities in the face of the history and the humanity…
Because the triggering of the imperialist war, even a generalized one, doesn’t necessarily mean the definitive crushing of the proletariat. Indeed, historically, if the war in the first time means a relative crushing, it can then dialectically determine a re-emergence of the struggles all the more strong since it is the war that exposes the contradictions and the brutality immanent to the capitalist system. For the revolutionary proletarians the struggle against war directly means revolutionary defeatism.
The revolutionary defeatism turns its back on all pacifism even when it is disguised and radicalized, that is to say it refuses all positions not giving any concrete and precise instructions with a view to encouraging and acting violently for the defeat of “our” camp, “our” nation, “our” army, “our” bourgeoisie.
[…] As long as the denunciation of the capitalist war remains limited only to claim a return to the previous period, to the peace (that can be nothing but the social peace so needed to the process of extraction of surplus value as a result of the obligation to go to work for us, modern slaves); as long as the dialectical links between the capitalist war and peace are not revealed and emphasized, all these pacifist demonstrations are only condemned to passively attend the imposition of even more terrorist social peace, the peace of graves…
Contrary to pacifist snivelling, the revolutionary defeatism means first of all no sacrifices in the name of interest of the nation, it means social struggles for working class living and working conditions, even when a war already sparked off and “our” bourgeoisie calls for national unity. On more advanced level it means to organize sabotage of the economy, the production, the weapons convoys... all the nationalist consensus, in parallel to organization of the obvious defeatist propaganda that has to shake the whole society up to the very foundations of the certainties enrooted in minds of all the “useful idiots”...
# The revolutionary defeatism means to organise all actions aiming to undermine the morale of the troops as well as to prevent dispatching proletarians to the slaughter...
# The revolutionary defeatism means to organise the most massive desertion and cease fire between proletarians in uniforms on both sides of the frontline, to leave distant fronts and to bring war, not between proletarians but between classes, i.e. class war, into centres of war super-powers...
# The revolutionary defeatism means to encourage fraternisation, mutinies, turning the guns against the organizers of war carnage, i.e. “our” bourgeoisie and their lackeys...
# The revolutionary defeatism means the most determined and offensive action with a view to turning the imperialist war into revolutionary war for the abolition of this class society based on starvation and war, revolutionary war for communism.
Obviously, the revolutionary defeatism can’t be conceived in only one camp. Anti-war sabotage, as we understand it, depends on the international nature of the proletariat and it is therefore aimed at our class all over the world. The revolutionary defeatism means the all-out struggle against “our” bourgeoisie in all camps, in all countries.
If the proletariat wants to definitively get rid of this slaughter, the one and only solution is to generalise actions of revolutionary defeatism. The development of struggle has its own requirements: it must break social cohesion not only in the units of the army but also in the whole society. For this we will have to put once and for all an end to nationalism while reaffirming loud and clear that proletarians have no interest in this war or in this dying world. We call for only one war, the war against our exploiters, no matter whether they are Ukrainian, Russian, American, German, English, French, Czech or whatever.
# More than ever we reaffirm our support to proletarians in struggle all over the world…
# We call on proletarians to denounce all military intervention and to strongly oppose it through direct action, sabotage, generalized and insurrectional strike…
# Wherever war planes and warships, missiles and poison gas come from, behind them there are always men and women – wage workers –who have to transport them to their destination, to fuel them… Only proletarians in struggle can and have to prevent the war machine to kill, the production machine to function…
# Let’s develop new hotbeds of struggle, let’s consolidate those already existing; let’s apply the strike to armies, factories, mines, offices, schools… anywhere we suffer exploitation from this world of death and misery…
# Against our own exploitative bourgeoisie, against our own warmongering State, in the US, Russia, Ukraine, France, Great Britain, EU, China, Iran, Turkey, Syria, etc., let’s organize and develop revolutionary defeatism.
# To be a patriot means to be a murderer! Down with all States!
# Class solidarity with the revolutionary defeatists of all camps!
# Let’s turn our guns against “our” generals, against “our own” bourgeoisie!
# Let’s raise again the flag of the world communist revolution!
Class War # april 2018
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