Two Leaflets: Against capitalist war and peace - ICG

Against capitalist war and peace

There is no capitalism without war!

To abolish war we have to abolish capitalism!

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Against all reformist and pacifist illusions about war, we publish here two leaflets circulated during and after the war in Kosovo, the first one in Hungary, the second one in the United States of America (Portland, Oregon). They have been produced by comrades who are fighting with us for the centralisation of the proletarian community of struggle against capitalism, a community that is still not aware enough of its own existence and of its historic force.

Both leaflets are internationalist militant expressions reminding us that both war and peace are against the proletariat, that both are moments of the counterrevolutionary affirmation of capitalism against the interests of humanity.

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Down with capitalist war! Down with capitalist peace!

The war is already in our neighbour's. The Hungarian and the Yugoslavian government, the NATO and the UCK, Clinton and the Pope... they all try to convince us that this war - just like all other wars - is the consequence of some fatal mistakes, of some surprising abnormality, of a slight hitch in the smooth running of the democratic world system, and it is the brainchild of certain mad leaders. They all claim to be fighting for peace...

They talk to us of peace - and they drive us into war!

But war is not a fatal mistake. Just on the contrary. It's the essence of capitalism, and one of the bases of its functioning is the permanent economic fight among the different fractions of capital. Capital is inherently imperialist. Conquering and obtaining more and more markets belong to its normal way of functioning. The multiplication of centres of war is a necessarily phenomenon. And it is always the proletarians who get the worse in the fight between the different fractions of capital. War is taking place in our everyday life too: when we are forced to work, when the maintenance of our mere life is getting more and more difficult... But sometimes capitalist "peace" is replaced by open war.

War is always against the interests of the proletariat!

What does war mean on the level of everyday reality?
- death on the front line and in the trenches...
- death in the prison camps
- death in the refugee camps, by the side of roads, next to mass graves...
- death at home, under the ruins of houses...
- conscriptions, mobilization... in order to force us to massacre each other, to kill our proletarian brothers in the interest of capital...
- compulsion of work, militarization of work and the increasing of its intensity...
- hunger, misery, high prices, shortages...

This reality shows evidently that the war is against the proletariat, against our interests and against our struggle. This war is a new episode in the already endless list of attacks by the worldwide capitalist State against the proletariat. This nth war is nothing but a genuine product of the capitalist world of exploitation.

This war in Yugoslavia is another step towards the more generalised war through the "acceptance" (an "acceptance" that is being imposed by terror and permanent blackmail!) by all of war as the "natural" perspective for society in crisis. The majority of proletarians passively watch the progression of massacres on their television screens. Since the crisis is "natural", so unemployment, misery, all kinds of sacrifices also become "natural". You no longer protest, you start to accept to sacrifice yourself. And with this same logic, you will soon find yourself on the train leaving for the front!

This is not surprising since the majority of proletarians today, especially in Europe, remain prisoners of patriotism and other bourgeois ideological frameworks such as "pacifism", "anti-imperialism" or still "anti-fascism" (all of which defend democracy, the social order of capitalism ). This is not surprising either when we can see that the international proletariat today is not capable of affirming its revolutionary nature with its own communist project.

As long as we remain passive consumers and spectators of our own miserable lives, as long as we remain "useful idiots", everything can happen to us. We shouldn't be surprised then if tomorrow these good citizens start to kill each other for any reason you care to name! Neighbour against neighbour, workmate against workmate, proletarian against proletarian.

The fact, that war is becoming "normal", and the constant threat terrorizes, threatens not only the proletariat of the states that are directly involved in the war, but also the proletariat of the whole world. And capitalism - while it is launching wars - is talking of peace and humanitarianism. But humanitarian campaigns, aid actions, etc are only means of blackmailing - and, in passing, make market for tons of unsaleable products - by which the control over the proletariat is being strengthened.

oOo

Today Yugoslavia is the most important centre of war in Europe. There are several reasons for launching the war there, but one of the most important is that since the middle of the '80s the proletarians in Yugoslavia opposed a fierce resistance to the austerity measures of the state. Compared with the beginning of the '90s, the war has become considerably larger in scale. The NATO has intervened, Hungary has become a war country; the international capital has attacked the proletarians of the region. One of the direct reasons for this is the proletarian insurrection in Albania, which started in 1997. The bourgeoisie hasn't managed to restore order in Albania since then. Today the bourgeoisie tries to minimise the treat of revolution: they drive the proletarians into an imperialist war, setting them nationalist aims. In the fight "Serbs" are incited against "Albanians" in order to hide that the real fronts are not between nations, but between the two classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat!

The UCK (the Kosovo Liberation Army) is also part of the bourgeois state, just like all confronting fractions. It is proved by their nationalism, their army conscripted by force, which terrorises the population exactly the same way as the Serb police does, their concentration camps (they call them refugee camps), in which the terror guys of the UCK collect everyone still fit for military service and send them to the front line, to die.

We, communists are against all sides, against the Serbs and the Albanians, against the NATO and the whole "international community", against all states, against every bourgeois fraction. We have no homeland! To be a patriot is to be a murderer!

Hungary has become a front-line country.
We can expect:
- the escalation of the war - since the mobilisation of reservists, the preparation of the civil defence guard, etc. have already started
- stabilisation of war conditions
- increasing nationalist incites, spreading of irredentism (today Vojvodina, tomorrow Transylvania, Slovakia, Carpathian-Ukraine...)
- price rises, austerity measures because of the war
- increasing surveillance over the proletariat, intensification of the official (police, security guards) and unofficial (fascist gangs) state terror.

FIGHT AGAINST WAR = FIGHT AGAINST CAPITALISM!!!

We're not powerless: we are rich in the historical experience of our class, we must reappropriate the collective memory of our struggles; this provides us with the classist framework for our own activities and saves us having to reproduce the same mistakes again and again. We also know that our struggle carries real perspectives, from life itself. Looking ahead, we want to destroy non-life, our misery, exploitation!

In this fight we can only count on our own strength, on the power of the proletariat. We, first of all, attack the bourgeois fraction which we are directly confronted with, we fight against "our own bourgeoisie". Internationalism doesn't mean to "do something for proletarians everywhere"; but it means to be the part of the same struggle, to assert here as everywhere the community of interests and of struggle that we share with our class brothers and sisters in Serbia, in Kosovo and everywhere in the world. Revolutionary defeatism = the struggle for the defeat of "one's own bourgeoisie" - against the whole bourgeois order!

Proletarian brother! Don't let the capital fool you! Organise against capitalism! Sabotage production! Desert the army! Turn your arm against the real enemy!

Read, spread this leaflet, and discuss it with others!

Milosevic = UCK = NATO

DOWN WITH ALL STATES! LONG LIVE COMMUNIST WORLDREVOLUTION!

Internationalist Proletarians

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Against War, Against Peace

The small number of people today who appear to oppose America's present bloody military interventions must be aplodded for their courage and persistance.

They stand against the masses' constant, unthinking aproval of military force. And they are faced with situation where they have no ideas to give them any expectations that they could effectively oppose these interventions.

The ideas put at the recent anti-war demos seem approximately divided between pacifism and reformulations of the classical Trotskist or Maoist left. Each of these approaches have some insights into the conditions of the current slaughter (we are writing at the point of simultaneous bombing campaigns against Yugoslavia and Iraq). Passifists realize that the actions of each side serves mainly to polarize the entire situation. Leninist leftists realize that each side is motivated by market forces and the need to preserve capitalism. Each position has totally ridiculous qualities as well. Pacificist ideology implies that the government, the powerful or "we," may somehow just wake-up to the "mistake" that were made and change the course of the war. Each Leninists group looks for a particular nation to push as "oppressed" and naturally ignores the obvious common interest each national gangster has with the other. The different flavors "socialist" absurdly talk about "imperialism" when capitalism conquered the entire world and NATO's intervention surely serves to strength the bloody nationalism of Yugoslavia/Serbia.

What each side misses is that this war is an inherent result of normal daily life. What is naively called peace - work, shopping and television - is the health of the state and the war machine. The housing development, the industrial park and the shopping mall create and are created by the military industrial complex. Not only does military production sustain the economy, but every dictatorial institution, from McDonalds to Microsoft to the Department of Defense, reinforces every other. The wars of today are quite correctly called "police actions." America's army intervenes on world scale to keep the same bloody order that cops protect on a local level. The goal of NATO is not to simply to dominate Kosova but to control the direction of it's development - to assure that exploitation and peace prevail. Just as in Somalia, the war in Kosova began to impose a "humanitarian solution" to the problem of a dispossessed that would not behave. And this humanitarian solution is the order of capitalism itself. "Humanitarian" organizations around the world have shown themselve to be in many ways as much pawns of world capitalist as NATO. While some NGOs are simply fronts for west intelligence agencies, their fundamental problem comes as they operate with the paradigm of putting the dispossessed in a positon of dependence and training the dispossessed for order of development. In this way, the "NGOs" serve as social workers ("soft cops") to NATOs hard cops. The humanitarian peace that NATO, NGOs and the United Nations seeks impose is specifically to keep proletarians in a position of dependence. If the various nations or organizations disagree about methods, it merely a question of fighting about who gets to carve up the pie. A full picture of this process can be seen in UN "humanitarian" refugee camps set-up after the uprising against Saddam Husain in Northern Iraq ("Kurdistan"). These camps demanded proletarian surrender their weapons in exchange for food - food which the UN had itself embargo agaainst Iraq. The camps were served to defeat the rebellious proletarians who were fighting America's supposed enemy, Saddam Hussein. Indeed, US forces in the Gulf War had already killed 50,000 Iraqi deserters while working hard to keep Saddam Huesain in power. (It is quite possible that once the dust settles in Kosova we will find that similar rebellions happened and were suppressed by both sides. But naturally, the actual situation is difficult to determine). In any case, the present order of war and peace is directly against the proletariat, and our rebellions, our refusal to accept the dictatorship of money, of work and bureaucracy.

Dispossessed Of All Nations Unite and Destroy Your Enemies.

ASAN
PO Box 3305
Oakland, CA
94609