No War but the Class War: Statement from NWBCW Sydney

A War in the Pacific is a War on the Working Class

The war in Ukraine has already claimed an enormous human toll and imperialist tensions the world over only continue to tighten while the corpses pile up. We have heard already from media and political talking-heads that the war in Ukraine is a fight between democracy and autocracy. In truth, this conflict is the product of a decaying social system whose ever more frequent crises compel it to pursue war as a means of profit-making. All the lofty rhetoric and speeches used to justify participating in the carnage is a convenient excuse for the bosses’ class to drag workers into the meat grinder of war to protect their profits.

The Australian government is quickly ramping up its defence budget and its capitalist class has already chosen a side on the world stage, as made apparent by the AUKUS agreement.(1) The government is an ally of the U.S. in the Pacific and, as a result, an adversary of China’s government, which has sought to grow its own sphere of influence within the region. Australia, the U.S., Japan and the Philippines conduct major military drills in the ocean, and China does the same. Australia has also planned joint patrols with the Philippines in the South China Sea, a historical trade route between Asia and the rest of the world that has been contested for decades.

Ukraine signifies the road to generalised warfare, but many other conflicts, such as the brewing multi-state war in the Sahel, and, more recently, the escalation of military aggression between Azerbaijan and Armenia, which threatens to implicate more states, shows us just how quickly the world situation can devolve. History also makes clear that the capitalists – the class that benefits from all the wars but has never had to fight them – will mobilise all the means at their disposal to enlist workers for the imperialist bloodbath. As the conflict escalates, they will invariably appeal to the defence of the Nation or motherland, an impossible Utopia where exploiter and exploited coexist as equals, but which hides the brutal reality of class society.

Here and all over the world, real wages have fallen as inflation and living costs continue to increase. Although there have been responses to the deterioration of working people’s living conditions, these have remained isolated. The recent LNG “strikes” in Western Australia have shown that Australia occupies an important role as a junior partner in its own imperialist bloc. The unions, meanwhile, have left workers in the dark and defenceless against the ravages of capital, and have sought to dampen the workers’ resistance by organising workplaces as opposed to industries, which would be disruptive to the war preparations of our rulers. The unions have thus shown which side they are on: that of the bosses and their state. While unions control the struggle, workers cannot fight back against the assaults on their living conditions, much less put a brake on our rulers’ plans to join a war that could quickly become apocalyptic in scale and consequences.

Let us be clear, this war and everything else that necessarily comes with it represents nothing short of an attack against working people in the entire world. There is no ‘lesser evil’ to support, either in this conflict or any other; that is another mythology sold to workers by the bosses’ class to induce us to fight and die in their wars, which are always and exclusively waged to gain a bigger share of the total profits that we generate for them by our labour. Those who call for the defence of any state within these imperialist conflicts are not friends of working people, however much they might posture, and say and try to appear otherwise. Against the shameless warmongering of most political quarters, we proudly exclaim our slogan: “No War but the Class War!”

Working people everywhere share fundamental interests born of their common relationship to the economy as an exploited collective. Only the workers’ struggle, across industries and the artificial borders established by our rulers has any chance of stopping the vast war machine. To spread the internationalist message of independent class struggle, NWBCW committees, like this one, made up of committed internationalists are being created in many places. Such committees have formed in the US (Chicago and Miami), South Korea, France (Paris), Italy (Rome), Britain (Glasgow and Liverpool), Canada (Montrèal and Toronto) and Turkey, with more emerging.

The activities of the NWBCW committees globally emphasise their essential role within the class to prepare and organise workers on their own terrain against the current conflict and all others to come. The committees have agitated along picket lines and protests and organised meetings and discussions, showing it is not a committee designed for mobilising the class in general, nor is it a struggle committee, or a project to re-group certain political elements within the class. Rather, it is a joint effort of internationalists from any or no organisation to spread the internationalist message to the wider working class, as distilled in the five points below:

• Against capitalism, imperialism and all nationalisms. No support for any national capitals, “lesser evils”, or states in formation.
• For a society where states, wage-labour, private property, money and production for profit are replaced by a world of freely associated producers.
• Against the economic and political attacks that the current war, and the ones to come, will unleash on the working class.
• For the self-organised struggle of the working class, for the formation of independent strike committees, mass assemblies and workers’ councils.
• Against oppression and exploitation, for the unity of the working class and the coming together of genuine internationalists.

If you agree with the points above, then you should contact us at [email protected]

NWBCW Sydney
September 2023

Notes:

(1) AUKUS: Another Preparation for Imperialist War by ICO leftcom.org