“THEIR WARS! OUR DEAD!” It was under this banner that radical proletarians distanced themselves from the pacifist pro-cessions organized in the streets of Spain in March 2004 after the massacre attacks in Madrid that left more than 200 dead. They put forward this defeatist motto in response to Spain’s military engagement in Iraq and the “War on Terror” imposed by the world capitalist State and its Spanish branch, thus echoing the many historical manifestations of revolutionary defeatism that punctuate the development of class societies and therefore of class struggle, of class war.
As social-revolutionary proletarians, communists, anarchists…, we have absolutely no material interest in siding in any way with the capitalist State and its democracy, whatever it looks like, with our class enemies, with our exploiters, with those who have always harshly given us back “bullets, machine guns and prison” when we struggle and take to the streets to claim our humanity. And this, regardless of the nature and political orientation of the regime in place in homeland A or homeland B, which are confronting each other in an interstate conflict for their own interests of conquest and power. We will never express any solidarity with any of our exploiters!
THEIR INTERESTS! OUR DEAD! We do not take a stand for any of the States in conflict, whether one is categorized according to the dominant bourgeois political morality as “the aggressor” and the other as “the aggressed” or vice versa. Their respective interests at stake are exclusively theirs and in total opposition to those of the exploited class, that is, us proletarians; this is why, outside and against all nationalism, all patriotism, all regionalism, all localism, all particularism, we affirm loud and clear our internationalism!
The proletariat, as a revolutionary class, does not show any neutrality towards any of its exploiters who confront each other in the redistribution of their market shares, but on the contrary, it equally rejects them as two sides of the same reality, the world of exploitation of one class by another, and it expresses its deep solidarity with all the sectors of our class that are undergoing the multiplied assaults of one or the other of its historical enemies. But let us be clear, we will never ever deny the proletarians the imperative need to defend themselves against any aggression, repression, torture, massacre…
And here, in the present case, the proletarians in Ukraine no longer have in front of them only their usual, daily enemy, i.e. the “aggressed” Ukrainian State and its local bourgeois (called “oligarchs” to better hide their real class nature, as if they were different from all the other capitalists elsewhere in the world), they do not only have to undergo the attacks of their own bourgeoisie (with wage cuts, layoffs, war economy, repression of the subsequent strike movements), but since February 24th of this year, they also have to face the military offensive of the “aggressor” State of the Russian capitalists with their army, their bombings, their missiles, their daily massacres…
THEIR NATIONS! OUR DEAD! And to all the warmongers of the left and far left of Capital who will once again accuse revolutionaries of being “neutral” and not “taking a stand”, we answer them that it’s quite the contrary that we propose in this manifesto and in our militant activity in general: we take an unwavering stand for the party of the proletariat and the defense of its historical and immediate interests, we stand up for its action of subversion of this world of war and misery, we stand up for the development, the generalization, the coordination and the centralization of the already existing acts of fraternization, desertion, mutiny on both sides of the front, against both belligerents, against both States, against both nations, against both local fractions of the world bourgeoisie… We stand up for the extension of these struggles and their organic connection as moments of a totality with all the struggles that have been happening since several months, everywhere under the black sun of the social dictatorship of Capital, whether in Sri Lanka, Peru, Iran, Ecuador or Libya…
We stand up for the development of the third camp, the only camp that defends the global interests of the proletariat in its immediate and historical struggle against exploitation, wage labor, misery and war. This third camp is that of the internationalist revolutionary proletariat, which opposes all the bourgeois warring camps, it is the camp of our class brothers and sisters who fight for their own interests, which are antagonistic to the interests of all those who defend private property, money and social order that goes with it…
THEIR PEACE! OUR EXPLOITATION! If we categorically reject all bourgeois wars, in which the proletariat serves only as cannon fodder, no matter which camp it is incorporated into, we reject “peace” just as much and with the same force, “peace” which is nothing else than the inverted but complementary moment of “war”. Peace is only a moment of reconstruction between two wars, because war is necessary for Capital to temporarily solve the crises inherent to its mode of production. But war is also the supreme moment of social peace, and the latter is only the materialization of the permanent war waged against our class through the exploitation of our labor power, the commodification of our lives and the alienation of our existences.
Coming back to Ukraine, we would like to stress here that if we strongly oppose the support of any side in the current war, which is nothing but an interstate war, if we refuse to take sides with one or the other of the bourgeois belliger-ents, both the “occupied” Ukrainian “aggressed” and the “occupying” Russian “aggressor”, our judgement is different and even antagonistic when analyzing the events that took place just a few weeks before the beginning of the war in Ukraine. We are talking about the military repression in Kazakhstan and the “occupation” of this country by elite troops of the Russian army: one “occupation” is not necessarily equal to another!
OUR REVOLTS! OUR DEATHS! Obviously, nobody was shocked, or very few were, by the repression of the workers’ uprising in Kazakhstan last January, and for good reason. Not even in the West, where finally the capitalists understood very quickly that the Russian bourgeoisie, by “invading” Kazakhstan which had become socially out of control, by crushing the revolting proletariat, by restoring through terror the order of big business, the order of international business, was in fact objectively working for the interests of all the capitalists, and therefore also of the multinationals which have their headquarters in the West. Here lies the whole difference in nature between on the one hand the “occupation” of Kazakhstan to repress a social movement that partially endangered the present order of things, the capitalist order, and on the other hand the “occupation” of a part of Ukraine in a conflict that responds to geostrategic interests between different fractions of the same world Capital.
Everybody will easily understand that the proletarian approach to these two types of occupation, and how to take sides, will be totally different. In the case, as in Ukraine, where there are two bourgeois actors who confront each other, to take position and to commit oneself against one of them, against the “aggressor” (here in this case, the Russian State), but not against the other, the “aggressed” (the Ukrainian State), comes objectively, and especially in an eminently practical way, whether one likes it or not, in spite of one’s own will, in spite of what one affirms, to commit oneself with and to support the latter, and this all the more so in the absence of any real dynamic of autonomization towards the military structures, the supply structures, which frame this commitment. Because let’s not delude ourselves, there was not before the outbreak of the war, and there is not for the moment, any strong revolutionary movement in Ukraine, sufficiently antagonistic so that it can assert the social power of our class and defend its immediate and historical interests.
On the other hand, in the case of a proletarian uprising in a given region which the bourgeoisie is obliged to repress by the contribution of an “external” intervention force (because of the defeatism which undermines the local forces of repression), the resulting “occupation” takes on a completely different character. Our enemy is our own bourgeoisie, of course, but it is above all the bourgeoisie that we have directly in front of us, the one repressing us, the one bombing us, the one massacring us, the one taking the place of the bourgeois fraction that initially exploited us, the one that substitutes for it. Of course, we understand that against an “aggression”, against an “occupation”, against massacres and repression, the proletarians want to resist, to take up arms, to defend themselves… But as much in Kazakhstan this armed resistance would have for goal to defend the social uprising, to defend an embryo of revolutionary dynamics, as much in Ukraine the resistance of the proletarians, once again if it is limited only to one of the protagonists of the warlike confrontation, risks very quickly to annihilate itself in the arms of the Ukrainian State, of its allies and their bourgeois interests. This is at least what the history of the struggles of our class has always shown us, until proven otherwise… and the historical example of Spain 1936-37 is revealing in this respect since the revolution was sacrificed there in the name of a “lesser evil” to defend, the bourgeois republic, the anti-fascist popular front, faced with what was represented as “the absolute evil”: fascism.
In Spain yesterday as in Rojava and in Ukraine today, “the people in arms” is not, far from it, the armed proletariat; armed with the weapons of criticism that allow to develop the real criticism with weapons…
We can therefore only salute the proletarians who refuse to position themselves in one or the other of the bourgeois camps in presence and who, on the contrary, affirm their internationalism and organize themselves to oppose the two enemy brothers. Like in the 80’s of the last century when “Iraqi” deserters organized themselves with “Iranian” deserters, during the terrible butchery that lasted eight long years, and when they joined their forces to fight together both bourgeois armies.
Greetings therefore to the proletarian women in Ukraine, both in the western region of Transcarpathia (thus under Ukrainian military administration) and in Donbass, in the “eastern provinces” (thus under Russian military administra-tion), who took to the streets to express their contempt for the “defense of the homeland” and to demand the return of their sons, their brothers, their relatives sent to any of the fronts to defend interests that are not their own.
Greetings to the proletarians in Ukraine who are secretly sheltering Russian soldiers who deserted, at their own risk because when they are arrested, either by the Russian military authorities, or by the Ukrainian ones, they are made to understand where the legal force is in this filthy world, which side and which homeland they have to defend and that no fraternization will be tolerated
Greetings to the proletarians in Ukraine, who in spite of the compulsory conscription, flee their incorporation in military units by all means at their disposal, legal or not, and thus refuse to sacrifice themselves and to serve under the folds of the Ukrainian national rag.
Greetings to the Russian soldiers who, since the beginning of the “special operations” in Ukraine, have been fleeing the war and its massacres, abandoning tanks and armored vehicles in working order, and seeking their salvation in flight, via networks of solidarity with deserters from both armies.
Greetings also (although the information on this subject is less sure, war of press releases and military propaganda obliges!) to the 600 soldiers of the Russian Marine Corps who refused at the very beginning of the conflict to disembark, thus making scuttle an amphibious landing in the area of Odessa.
Greetings also (with the same reservations) to the Russian soldiers who mutinied and refused to assault Kharkov, also at the very beginning of the conflict.
Greetings to the soldiers of the army of the “Donetsk People’s Republic”, forcibly incorporated and sent to the Mariupol front, who refused to continue to fight, to serve as “cannon fodder” (according to their own expression!), while this time they were sent to defend the neighboring “Lugansk People’s Republic”.
Greetings to the rebels and saboteurs who in the Russian Federation have already burned down dozens of military recruitment offices and other offices of pigs all over the country.
Greetings to the railroad workers in Belarus who have repeatedly sabotaged railroad tracks, which are essential to maintaining the supply lines of the Russian army deployed in Ukraine.
Greetings to the proletarians in Ukraine who, as soon as the first bombings began, started to organize collective looting of stores abandoned by their owners, of supermarkets and shopping malls, as was reported in Melitopol, Mariupol, Kherson and even Kharkov, thus putting forward the satisfaction of their elementary needs of survival against all laws and morals that protect private property.
Greetings to all the proletarians on the Homefront who organize strikes and refuse to offer their labor and their sweat to the war economy, to the economy of social peace, and thus to the economy at all, whether they are conscious of it or not.
And finally, greetings to the proletarians, railway workers, dockers… in Europe, in Greece, in England… who refuse to transport military equipment for NATO to Ukraine.
Greetings then to all of you who refuse to sacrifice yourselves on the altar of war, misery and homeland!!!
And the day, which we hope is very close, when the proletarians will take to the streets of Moscow and Kiev, and of all the big urban areas of Russia and Ukraine, chanting with one voice “Putin and Zelenski, get out!”, then we will answer in our turn, referring to the comrades who brandished in the streets of Argentina some twenty years ago the motto “¡Que se vayan todos!”, may all of them get out, may them get the hell out, the Biden, Johnson, Macron, Scholz, Sanchez, von der Leyen, Michel, Stoltenberg… all these war and misery mongers… and all of those, absolutely all of those, who are lining up for the political alternation!
But let’s be clear: they are only go-betweens in this system of generalized prostitution that is wage labor, the mandatory sale of our labor force. Beyond all the people who embody the social dictatorship of Capital, the latter is above all an impersonal social relation that can be, is and has been reproduced by any element, bourgeois or proletarian, co-opted to do so. So, even if we fully share the joy of the proletarians in Sri Lanka who, after having driven out the incumbent president a few days ago, invaded his presidential palace and dived into his luxury swimming pool, the question we have to ask ourselves is: how to push the revolutionary dynamic to its ultimate consequences, how to expropriate the possessing class and reappropriate our means of existence… and above all how not to go backwards!? This is where the genuine human adventure begins…
Class War – July 31st, 2022
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