To the Workers
of Israel,
to the Workers of Palestine,
to the Workers of Europe and America!
(«Proletarian»; Nr. 2; September 2006)
WORKERS OF ISRAEL !
Your future does not
lie in collaboration with your bourgeoisie; it does not reside in approving of
the massacre of men, women, the elderly and infants alike by armoured tanks
adorned with the star of David, nor in impotent peace marches which have never
stopped even one war! The pretext of «terrorism» should not incapacitate you
because it is used by the bourgeoisie to once again force you into the union
sacrée . The bourgeoisie has the absolute necessity of chaining you to its
requirements, its objectives: without your support, without your complicity,
without your silence it could not defend its class interests any longer nor
make war against the Palestinians or against other countries. The terrorist
attacks are utilized by the bourgeoisie to justify these military operations
and all these political and social measures: if they did not exist, they would
invent them.
Your future lies in
the proletarian struggle, above all against your own bourgeoisie, the struggle
in which you can find true allies only in your proletarian class brothers and
sisters, beyond nationality; and your class brothers and sisters are above all
the Palestinians towards whom you must show an active solidarity because they
are oppressed and massacred by your bourgeoisie. But in order to solidarize as proletarians,
it is essential to break the chains which constrain you to collaborate with
your government, your bourgeoisie, your capitalists.
It is only if you
succeed in breaking from this bondage, only if you succeed in freeing yourself
from the suffocating pressure of Jewish nationalism and bourgeois democratism,
that you will not only be in solidarity with Palestinian and other
proletarians, but will be able to defend your own true class interests.
PALESTINIAN WORKERS!
You have always
been told that Palestine is the fatherland to be re-conquered, to which you
dedicate all your forces, all your energies, your whole being. The national
oppression that Israel exerts on you as on the whole Palestinian population,
has led you to identify your vital interests with the «national» interests,
with the interests of your national bourgeoisie.
Any fatherland is a
bourgeois objective and exclusively bourgeois. It is defined by a territory on
which the bourgeoisie builds its State with all its institutions, its army, its
police force and its courts, creates its market, mints its currency, produces
its goods, a territory where it assumes the right to exploit its workers
directly (and perhaps the workers of poorer countries) to extract the profit
for which it lives. The workers, because they have nothing to lose, do not
have a fatherland!
You are the
practical demonstration of this Marxist axiom: as workers, you are exploited in
Israel, in Jordan, in Lebanon, in Syria, in Egypt, in Italy, in France, in
America or elsewhere. As workers, you are obliged to sell your labour power
whatever the country where you have taken refuge, with whichever owner it is
who intends to exploit you to extort a profit from your work.
As workers,
particularly in Israel, you undergo two types of oppression: to the oppression
of wage-labor which welds you together with the workers of the whole world, the
brutality of national oppression is added, on behalf of a country which is
praised as the only «true democracy» in all the Middle East. But the fight
against the national oppression exerted against you should not make you forget
that the Palestinian bourgeoisie only seeks to use you, and does not seek to
utilize your combativeness, your courage, and your blood for anything other
than its own specific class interests!
Your prospect
should not be the union with bourgeois classes which offer to you only the dead
end of nationalism or religious reaction; but it is neither in the abandonment
of the fight against national oppression and submission to the wills of the
dominant classes and States. The only prospect is that of the independent
class organization, as proletarians and not as Palestinians, for the fight
against capitalist exploitation and oppression; it is a path which is classist
and not a “peoples front”; proletarian, anti-bourgeois, non-nationalist and
non-islamist, politically and organizationally independent of the bourgeois
classes and not mired in interclassist democracy. It is only while being
carried out on the terrain of the class struggle, while being directed by the
proletarian organization that the struggle against national oppression can be
effective, can sensitize the proletarians of other nationalities and thrust
them towards active solidarity, towards proletarian internationalism.
WORKERS OF EUROPE AND
AMERICA !
The partisans of
Israel and its policy of oppression of the Palestinians are the same bourgeois
classes which asked you to support their war in Vietnam, in Algeria and
elsewhere; it is these same bourgeoisies which demanded your support in the two
last world wars – and which will again require of you the supreme sacrifice in
an eventual third world war. The working class should not support any of these
wars of plunder, of colonization, of pillaging that the bourgeoisies carry out
on the various continents. It must fight them all, it must oppose them all by revolutionary
defeatism and social confrontation.
Your bourgeoisies
are the most powerful in the world and thanks to this power they oppress whole
peoples and dominate the majority of the countries of the world. And they can
all the more easily exert this oppression because of the absence of class
struggle in the imperialist countries. To rip apart the social peace, to
rip apart the democratic and pacifist straightjacket which shackles it
and prevents the proletariat from finding its proper class orientation, to rip
apart the thousand bonds which were woven over the decades by political and
trade-union collaborationism, will not be an easy thing. It will be difficult,
but it is the only solution enabling it to find the capacity to defend itself
against all the injustices, against all the abuses, all the pressures and
repressions at the workplace and in daily social life!
The economic force
that the bourgeoisies of the imperialist countries use to secure their world
domination will be able to be transformed into a gigantic force of support for
the international revolutionary struggle against all the bourgeois powers, if
the European and American proletariat succeeds in seizing power and in
establishing its dictatorship. But that will not be possible other than, on the
one hand, by re-assimilating the classist traditions produced by the preceding
proletarian generations (in particular of Russia, of Germany, of Italy); and on
the other by assimilating the theory and the program of revolutionary Marxism
which condenses the experience of history and the future objectives of the
revolutionary proletarian movement.
The work of
transmission to the successive generations of the historical inheritance of the
class struggle is the task of the class party, the organization of
communist militants which takes its stand on the terrain of the anti-capitalist
revolution and which makes Communist theory and program the essential pivot to
direct the action of the proletarian forces towards their emancipation:
overthrow of bourgeois political power, introduction of the proletarian
dictatorship exerted by the unique, authentic Communist Party, revolutionary
war to defend the proletarian power and to support the revolutionary movements
in the capitalist countries, economic transformation of society by demolishing
the capitalist mode of production and setting up on its ashes the new communist
mode of production. The new proletarian power will recognize the right of
oppressed nationalities to separate from the old oppressor country. In the new
proletarian state, no constraints will be employed to maintain the formerly oppressed
nationalities by force:
«One thing alone is
certain: the victorious proletariat can force no blessings of any kind upon any
foreign nation without undermining its own victory by so doing », wrote Engels in
connection with the colonial question (letter to Kautsky, 09/12/1882). The
proletarian dictatorship will have as its objective the gathering together of
the proletarians of the whole world in one great anti-capitalist movement, so
that they link their forces in the struggle against all the national
bourgeoisies, beginning with the struggle against their own bourgeoisie. The
right to separation cannot be a fetish for the proletarian power, since the
broad objective is to unify all the populations of planet in a common society,
a society of all humanity, Communism. But this objective cannot be achieved by
using means of constraint similar to those of the bourgeois period, resorting
to forced assimilation or the annexation of territories and peoples. It will be
reached by the revolutionary struggle which the proletariat of all
nationalities, associated in a new Communist International, will carry out
against all the bourgeoisies – those of small nations just as the large ones –
and all forces related to the defense of capitalism.
This means that the
victorious proletariat will show an active and concrete solidarity in support
of the struggles taking place in the other countries in order to guarantee its
victory.
*
* *
In the current
situation of long dormancy of the class struggle, the conscious workers,
interested in the revolutionary cause, have a particularly important task: that
of adherence to the program and the theory of revolutionary Marxism; they have
to work for the formation of the class party, for this international communist
party without which the proletarian movement will never be able to triumph in
the confrontation with the ruling class, as demonstrated by the whole history
of social struggles, the history of revolutions and counter-revolutions.
( Extract from «Ai
proletari israeliani. Ai proletari
palestinesi. Ai proletari d’Europa e d’America», «il comunista», N° 79, April
2002; issued in «le prolétaire», N° 463, August-September 2002)
International Communist Party
www.pcint.org