Down with the Imperialist War and its genocidal savagery

Down with the Imperialist War and its genocidal savagery 

Down with the attacks against the working class promoted by capitalist bankruptcy

For worker’s governments and socialism! 

For the foundingof revolutionary worker’s parties and a revolutionary worker’s international 

Over a year has passed since the war in Ukraine began and every day it becomes clearer for the working masses of the world that this is an imperialist war between NATO and Russia. That we are witness to a massacre paid for by the lives, blood and sacrifice of the exploited, not only those of Ukraine but also in Russia, and the consequences that are felt by the peoples all over the world.

Led by Yankee imperialism, NATO is trying to present itself as an advocate for the just demand of national independence, democracy against autocratic and authoritarian tyrannys. Those who exploit the world’s masses, those who massacre nations (such as Afghanistan, Syria, Irak, Lebanon, etc.), those who invade and oppress nations, those who support and uphold bloody dictators and the reactionary protectors of capital , how could they be the paladins of democracy and national self-determination?

The war in progress isn’t an authentic national cause, nor is it in defense of democracy and human rights. The Ukrainian people are being used as cannon fodder by worldwide imperialism to attack Russia. It is a plan that has been prepared over many years in which NATO has been expanding in the east of Europe to accomplish this attack, and it corresponds with the strategic objective of subjugating Russia, and then immediately China, and to advance in the colonization of former nationalized economies.

Putin cannot be considered a hero against fascism either. His invasion of Ukraine had the purpose of expanding the influence and dominium of the bourgeois oligarchy created with the capitalist restoration of the Soviet Union. The Kremlin and the Russian army are not a liberating force nor do they personify the struggle of the peoples against imperialism. Russia’s foreign policy has been the extension of its internal policy: the latter characterized by a growing inequality and a rise in social antagonisms, the strengthening of a repressive estate/ police state and a regime based on the oppression of the Russian masses and entire nations still under Moscow’s thumb.

The workers of the world can’t support either faction. Stopping the war becomes a necessity, especially when it is threatening to expand and even turn into a world or nuclear war. This isn’t just a replay of previous conflicts, but a confrontation between the main players of the international arena that’s been developing in the old continent, that is, the heart of the capitalist system. We’re not witness to a proxy war, but to a direct intervention of NATO. Zelensky is just the arm of the military alliance led by Imperialism.

We call on Ukrainian and Russian workers to end the war, to remove their governments on both sides and to promote a brotherhood between nations, in every possible way and also among the troops of both countries.

All over the world, the left that calls itself revolutionary must put forward the historic slogan “war against war!”. No support for the imperialist attack. End all boycotts and economic sanctions that adversely affect the living conditions of the attacked peoples and humanity as a whole, to favor the profits of capitalist conglomerates. Mobilize against the governing class of your own country. Actively oppose the shipment of weapons and soldiers. Down with the war budgets, the development of the military industry and the rearming of bourgeois and imperialist governments. After a year has passed, it is plain to see that pacifism has unsurmountable limits. Delegating the solution of the conflict on those who promote and incite it cannot be a solution. Not only is it a dead end, but it is also a political crime, at a moment in which we can see that both sides are set on escalating it, which makes an aggravation and extension of the hostilities foreseeable and therefore, a larger bloodbath. We alert that a peace between the promoters of this war will only be a precarious compromise that will give way to new and fiercer clashes. The Minsk treaties celebrated in 2014 and 2015 which were incapable of stopping the current conflict, serve as a lesson.

It is necessary to transform the tendency towards world war into rebellion and socialist revolution. To end the nightmare of war, we must end the governments that promote it.

The war is inseparable from the capitalist crisis that is causing new bankruptcies and continuing the crisis of 2008. The central bank of each bourgeoisie has bailed out capital that is in crisis or under the threat of bankruptcy, injecting copious amounts of money, but they haven’t overcome the anemic state that prevails in the world economy. Fifteen years after the financial crisis of 2008, we are witnessing an explosive scenario of recession and inflation where the ghost of default rears its ugly head, not only for banks but for companies and even states. In other words: this is a global crisis, meaning a deeper crisis, a systemic crisis. This will bring more suffering for the working masses: greater prices and inflation, the growth of unemployment, precarious and unregulated contracts, and the increase in the exploitation by employers (the lengthening of working hours, the flexibilization of labor, etc.).

Capitalism intends to survive by unloading the crisis of its own regime of economic dominion through an even greater exploitation of the working masses, destroying their historic gains. This has resulted in a growing resistance and the mobilization of workers in metropolises and the peoples of semicolonial countries. In France, for instance, strikes and political demonstrations have been carried out against Macron’s attempts to raise the retirement age from sixty two to sixty four. All over the world we are facing the push from capitalists and their governments to impose counterreforms of pension programs. Their objective is that pensions cease to be a tax on capitalists in concept of paying deferred wages in payment of the exploitation of workers, transforming it into a sort of subsidy or social aid for poverty. Workers in France have retaken the methods of direct action in the class struggle, strikes and mass demonstrations. To triumph, they must move towards a general strike, which would open the possibility of ousting Macron and fighting for a workers’ government. That’s the reason the bureaucracy of the French union centrals block and resist the development of a revolutionary fight of the French working class and exploited peoples, their intention is to reconcile classes, to have a parliamentary agreement of reach and to protect the survival of the bourgeois state.

Working class and popular mobilization isn’t a strictly French phenomenon: it is in play in the powerful strikes in the UK and Germany, in the awakening of union organizing in the United States, in the continuing rebellions in Latin America, Asia and Africa.

To triumph in their demands and to open revolutionary situations that could put forward the possibility of taking the power for the working class it’s imperative to recover union and other mass organizations, removing pro bourgeois bureaucracies that every day show their vocation for integration into bourgeois states. It is a necessity to impose total political and organizational independence of the working class and their organizations from the bourgeois state, the employers and their political parties. Also, it is of the utmost importance to support the struggles that arise, promoting their transformation into comprehensive battles against the capitalist regime.

For that purpose it is fundamental to constitute socialist and revolutionary parties of the working class, with complete independence from the bourgeoisie, centered on the strategy of destroying bourgeois states that promote war and exploitation and to impose worker’s governments in every country. This can only be achieved with the methods of revolutionary direct action. The task is to found and build combative parties based on democratic centralism, to promote and develop the class struggle to its final consequences, the removal once and for all of the class of capitalist exploiters. It is necessary to avoid the purely verbal character of organizations that think they will bring the revolution solely with forecasts and analysis, while it is also necessary to avoid dissolving class positions in organizations based on identity or of an undefined character.

The capitalist catastrophe must be faced with an iron-clad working class, socialist and revolutionary militancy. This in and of itself is incompatible with “broad parties” and movementism, in which the limits between classes are vague and class conciliation and democratizing parliamentary tendencies prevail. This left’s role is limited to acting as a pressure group, completely adapted to the status quo, confined to participating in elections and trying to progress within the parliamentary regime and bourgeois democracy.

Revolutionary socialists fight in every area, including elections, to develop a complete delimitation from the bourgeois and petty bourgeois parties. This includes bourgeois nationalist leaderships and governments in backwards countries. These parties pretend to represent all the masses of the exploited nation, but they do it to defend the national bourgeoisie, who exploit them. In the end, they capitulate and associate themselves with imperialism against the revolutionary movement of the working masses.

Raising the flag of democracy, imperialism develops its reactionary, exploitative and warring intervention. This is a form taken by the state of capitalist oppression: bourgeois democracy, which tries to hide its oppressive character behind empty slogans, while it executes the plans of domination of big capital. We must overcome the conciliatory proposals made by opportunist parties, bourgeois nationalism and popular fronts that seek to reconcile with the dominant classes. These popular fronts end up limiting the independent action of the masses and smother their struggles. Facing and defeating the right and fascism, that have been growing lately, showing the decomposition of bourgeois democracy, will not come from the support and alliance of national bourgeoisies that call themselves democratic. Their impotence and alignment with the International Monetary Fund’s policies that inflict austerity measures on the people have allowed the development of the pseudo-fascist right, giving them space and facilitating their rise to power. Stopping the right is only being possible with worker’s mobilizations that can attract all exploited sectors.

We need to develop united front policies to promote the struggle against capital. New steps in that direction in the internationalist mobilization of the masses are fundamental to open up a new horizon. The Belgian workers of Total, a French oil monopoly, have refused to export oil from their refineries in Belgium to France, stopping the sabotage of the French oil worker’s strike. They retake the finest revolutionary internationalist traditions, those founded with the First International nearly a hundred and sixty years ago, in 1864, against possible replacement of the workforce with continental workers during a British proletarian strike. Now, more than ever, we need to promote every initiative to organize and to mobilize internationally against the imperialist war and the havoc that unloads the capitalist crisis on the workers and the exploited peoples of the world. We support the reconstitution of a revolutionary socialist International, that in light of historical experience can only be the continuation of the IV International, refounded.

The signatories of this document, the Socialist Party of the Workers from Turkey (SEP) and the Partido Obrero of Argentina (PO), call to discuss this statement among the leftist parties and the socialist and revolutionary militancy across the world.