There is only one solution to imperialist wars : the revolutionary class struggle!

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There is only one solution to imperialist wars : the revolutionary class struggle !

For more than four years, war has been raging between Russia and Ukraine, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths and injuries on both sides; in the Middle East, Israeli massacres have killed tens of thousands in Gaza, while U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran and Lebanon have claimed thousands of victims, forced hundreds of thousands to flee, and severely damaged civilian infrastructure; in Africa, the civil war in Sudan—in which regional states are pitted against one another and which has been ongoing for three years—has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives; in Asia, a war has broken out between Pakistan and Afghanistan, just months after clashes between India and Pakistan, while China continues to threaten to invade Taiwan.

While deadly conflicts are wreaking havoc across the globe, the international order—built on the post-war imperialist partition of the world, which had managed, with some difficulty, to contain the warlike impulses of various imperialist powers—now threatens to collapse under the onslaught of Russia and the United States. In every country, priority is now being given to accelerated “rearmament”; military spending is constantly rising, to the detriment of the living and working conditions of the population, and particularly of the working class. European military leaders assert that we must prepare for a war with Russia in the coming years (the French Chief of Staff declared that we must “accept losing children” for the good of the country), and new military services—voluntary for the time being—have just been created in France and Germany, as the war in Ukraine has demonstrated the need for a sufficient supply of cannon fodder to fuel the furnace of war: what looms on the horizon is the prospect of a widespread conflict, a third world war pitting the major powers directly against one another.

War is not an aberration caused by a few “warmongers,” the ambition of a few leaders, or the megalomania of a few dictators; it is the inevitable consequence of capitalism, a mode of production based on the exploitation of wage labor, unbridled competition, and the plundering of natural resources and the wealth of weaker nations. The aggression inherent in capitalism is undoubtedly tempered during periods of economic expansion by the growth of its profits, which also allows it to grant concessions to the working class in exchange for social peace, but it never disappears, as evidenced by the wars that have continued to mar the “peace” that followed the last world war. It manifests itself in full force when periods of crisis follow economic “prosperity”; then, as the proletariat’s so-called “gains” are called into question, competition on the world market intensifies into a trade war, and clashes between bourgeois states over the defense of national interests become ever more acute; capitalism inexorably drives the planet toward a new world war, enabling not only a new partition of the world following terrible massacres, but also a massive economic recovery thanks to the colossal destruction wrought by the conflict—as occurred after World War II.

Against this fatal spiral, it is futile to invoke respect for “international law” or the UN Charter, to issue repeated calls for peace, to brandish the threat of an international tribunal, or to resort to other farces that the leaders of the major imperialist powers openly mock. It may seem logical to side with the victim against the aggressor—to support, for example, Iran against the U.S.-Israel alliance—but this amounts to supporting one form of capitalism against another, to supporting the war that the Iranian regime continues to wage against the working class and the masses of that country.

The only realistic way to combat the wars currently being waged—and those that various bourgeois governments are consciously preparing—is to fight capitalism by refusing to support one side against another in the name of the “lesser evil.” The proletariat, whose exploitation sustains capitalism, holds in its hands the possibility of weakening and overthrowing it, as it has historically demonstrated—provided it fights exclusively in defense of its own class interests.

This means rejecting sacrifices made in the name of the so-called higher interests of the fatherland, the corporation, or the national economy—that is, interests that are entirely capitalist; rejecting any “national unity” and any class collaboration, which benefit only the exploiters; solidarity with immigrants and foreign workers, who are class brothers destined to become comrades in the struggle against capitalism; and organization independent of any bourgeois influence, whether reformist, legalist, or pacifist—in short, a return to genuine class struggle.

Uncompromising opposition to sacrifices—including in the immediate struggle today—is the first essential step toward building a class force capable tomorrow of opposing sacrifices on the battlefield, of transforming imperialist war into a civil war for the overthrow of bourgeois power and the establishment of the international dictatorship of the proletariat, an indispensable step to put an end to capitalism and open the way to a society without wars, without exploitation or injustice, without borders or states—communism.

Il comunista - le prolétaire - el proletario - proletarian - programme communiste - el programa comunista - Communist Program