Winds of war in Europe

(From ”Il comunista”; no. 171 ; December 2021 - January 2022)

Back Sumary

 

 

In a March issue of the British weekly The Economist, an article was published about the prospects of the French army's high command in connection with a hypothetical “high-intensity” war that could unfold on European territory and “with a significant number of civilian casualties.”(1) The article thus indirectly evokes the possibility of a large-scale conflict involving the major imperialist powers in Europe around 2030. Drawing on the conclusions of a French military think tank (2) and the comments of its Chief of General Staff, Thierry Burkhard, The Economist explains that the working hypothesis of the French armed forces (and therefore of the French state) is the unfolding of a “major confrontation” with Russia, Turkey or the countries of North Africa, with a vigour “not seen since the Second World War”. With this in mind, the French army, along with the British, Belgian and American armies, will carry out exercises in the Ardennes and at sea in 2023, involving 10 000 troops, thus launching a plan to prepare the armed forces for possible conflicts in the next decade.

As for the Spanish General Staff, without reaching the dimensions of France's vision, i.e. without giving military planning for the coming years a similar geopolitical rationale, it set 2035 (just five years after the date given by France) as the cut-off date for the reorganisation of the army. Spain's prospects can be said to be more modest, for although they point in the same direction as those of France, they provide no justification beyond the need to improve the operational capabilities of troops on the battlefield. In any case, the need for this improvement and the reform itself are in line with the French army's public statements. In the case of Spain, this is the 'Force 2035' project, a plan to reorganise ground troops to give them operational capabilities in urban areas, with hostile civilian populations, etc. This approach is technically very similar to that of the French army. On the other hand, the elaboration of this plan will take place within the framework of the “2017–2024 military cycle”, i.e. in terms analogous to the beginning of the French plan.

Apart from the coincidence in dates, which may be more or less accurate, it is certain that the approaches of these two armies (which will undoubtedly be common to other countries as well, just look at the cooperation they demand in their documents from their traditional allies) indicate that the prospect of war in the heart of Europe may be relatively close. What does this mean?

This means that the political and military tensions between the rival states, which until now have been transferred to third countries, to more or less distant territories, and have always been indirect, could intensify to such an extent that a direct military confrontation on the nearest ground, which would be the Mediterranean and Central and Eastern Europe, would be inevitable. Moreover, this could happen in a relatively short time, given that the French military does not envisage a time lag of more than a decade between the fulfilment of such a possible scenario.

Just as in the last decade, we have witnessed the re-emergence of the spectre of devastating economic crises, wars confined to the fringes of capitalism, etc., so the time that may resurrect the spectre of the great wars of the last century is according to the editors of The Economist perhaps more imminent than previously thought.

 

WAR AND BOURGEOIS PROPAGANDA

 

The question of war has never really disappeared from the horizon. Not because since the end of the Second World War, wars have not been a constant reality in the peripheral areas where the great imperialist powers clash using other armies and other countries as proxies, but because war is a crucial element of the analyses that the bourgeois class constantly harps on when talking about its world. It is not for nothing that this class, in all developed countries, boasts that it has been the first to be able to eliminate the use of war as a normal means of resolving conflicts between classes and peoples. From elementary school to military service (in countries where it is still compulsory) the bourgeoisie constantly repeats that peace is the main objective of all its political, and even military, activity, and that the maintenance of peace is an integral part of its political system.

It is obvious that nothing could be further from the truth: the bourgeoisie came to power by overthrowing the feudal ruling classes or the imperialist powers that dominated the colonised territories, through revolutionary wars that always had a double national dimension (civil wars against the power of the nobility on the one hand, and the maintenance of the bourgeois power once conquered on the other). These wars were not without bloodshed, as the long cycle of wars for national independence from India to Algeria, through Vietnam and Angola during the 20th century demonstrates.

That the bourgeoisie has asserted itself as the ruling class, that it has built and generalised its order through war, is an undeniable fact. But it is also undeniable that this order has been maintained by war: the bourgeoisie has not only fought against the ruling classes of the old regime, but from its very emergence it has had to clash with other national bourgeois classes to advance its commercial, economic and political interests wherever this required the support of armed force. The English bourgeoisie, victorious in its revolution as early as the seventeenth century, had no hesitation in opposing the armies of Napoleonic France, and even in supporting its feudal enemies against it, once it had recognised them as its allies, to maintain its influence on the European continent. In the past, the English bourgeoisie, which now boasts of having the essence of democracy in its blood, waged a terribly bloody war against the bourgeois rebellion of its American colonies that lasted eight long years. And it did the same decades later with extraordinary ferocity against the Irish rebels… We give these examples only to show that the use of war is justified even when the conflict is directed against the rising bourgeois classes. Besides, it should be remembered that the world wars which devastated Europe, the wars for the independence of the African and Asian colonies, etc. and, of course, the wars waged by the coalitions of the imperialist powers against the revolutionary proletariat which asserted itself as the ruling class in Paris in 1871 and Saint Petersburg in 1917, show that the bourgeoisies of all countries have devoted far more time to planning, organising and waging wars than to living in peace, that war is an integral part of their social order and that recourse to it always hovers in the air of relations between classes and nations.

It is true that not all wars are the same, but we do not say it in the sense that the bourgeoisie does so. For the bourgeoisie, this or that war is just and necessary according to whether it is just and necessary for itself, that is, whether it is waged in defence of its national interests, and it will always find a way to justify it (war against terrorism, in defence of national sovereignty under attack, etc.). For Marxists, war is necessary (”just” is a word we prefer to leave to moralists) insofar as it defends the interests of a class that represents the revolutionary forces of society. That is why the wars of the revolutionary bourgeoisie, which confronted feudal power and eventually overthrew it over large parts of the world, were necessary. Just as the revolutionary war of the proletariat was and is necessary for exactly the same reason: to eliminate the ruling class. And from the same point of view, the wars waged by the various bourgeoisies for the partition of the markets, i.e. imperialist wars, are neither necessary nor can they be accepted in any respect; they cannot represent a step in a revolutionary direction, they are a promotion of the bourgeois order, a strengthening of the class power of the bourgeoisie and a weakening of the proletarian class in every respect.

However, although the history of the class domination of the bourgeoisie and its very presence are punctuated by brutal armed clashes, for a large part of the European and American proletarian class the idea of peace, of a world relatively free of war, is common. This is not only (or rather, only to a tiny extent) due to the bourgeois class propaganda of the slogan of peace: it with its share, which constitutes a significant part of the bourgeois order, is complemented by the political and trade union forces of the politics of inter-class collaboration, by the social-democratic, Stalinist and post-Stalinist parties, which work with all their might to spread the myth of the peaceful and democratic progress of humanity.

Typically, these currents have been able to maintain influence over the proletarian class where the bourgeoisie has been unable to do so, precisely because they have claimed to represent the proletariat in its struggle against it. There is no space here to go back to explain the political and social character of opportunism and the causes of its growing influence among the proletariat, an aspect which has been repeatedly dealt with in our press (3). It is sufficient to point out here that an important element of this influence is precisely the defence of peace, which opportunism pretended to defend against the warlike tendencies of the bourgeoisie. Just as the fundamental function of opportunism is to tie the proletariat to the bourgeoisie by forcing it to accept its general interests as its own, identifying the fate of the two classes in the defence of the deceptively presented state as a subject standing above class interests, of democracy or parliamentary system, one of its particular functions is denying that war, and especially imperialist predatory wars whereby the various bourgeoisies clash for control of zones of economic influence, raw materials, etc., are the joint responsibility of the bourgeois class as a whole, and therefore of the capitalist system as such.

Stalinism's position in the face of imperialist war and the triumph of the counter-revolution meant that a policy along the lines of that advocated by the Second International was propagated within the proletarian class in all countries. National communist (i.e. Stalinist and post-Stalinist) parties were used both to tie the proletariat to the local bourgeoisie and to defend the imperialist interests of the nascent Russian bourgeois state. This dual function, which was also manifested in the sphere of propaganda, gave rise to slogans that became universally circulated: the responsibility for imperialist wars lies with a few greedy and cruel bourgeois who upset the international equilibrium and who must be seen to be solely responsible for it. It is clear that such a greedy and belligerent bourgeoisie was equated with the then enemy of Russia. And so we first saw the alliance of Russia and France against Italy and Germany, which materialized in terms of domestic politics in the Popular Fronts of 1935; then, after the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact with Nazi Germany, the enemy became “plutocratic England”; and finally, there was the alliance with England, the USA and Charles de Gaulle's France, which lasted for the rest of the Second World War. Meanwhile, the proletarian class was again massacred on the battlefields. The defence of the alliance of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie against the “Nazi-fascism” of Germany-Italy condemned the proletariat to defeat, all the more serious because it came from a country that had once been a great bulwark of the revolutionary and anti-bourgeois struggle. In the peace that followed, built on the millions of dead who fell in Europe, America, Asia and Africa, this anti-marxist policy scored a triumph that has been pursued ever since, inculcating in the proletarians an explanation of imperialist wars as phenomena irrelevant to the world of capitalism, as oddities for which only a few powers, a few multimillionaires, greedy in their desire for wealth and with little solidarity with the rest of the countries, are responsible. This doctrine of war has become so deeply rooted that although the main vehicle for its propagation, i.e. the falsely socialist Russia, collapsed in 1991, the myth of the 'just war' has remained. It was so useful to the bourgeois class that it has raised it as its eternal banner and kept it alive so that it can continue to use it throughout the world to justify its imperialist policies.

The bourgeoisie is preparing for wars of high intensity; the proletariat will have to prepare to respond by taking up the general revolutionary struggle!

 

WHAT THE PAST TEACHES US

 

The propaganda spread by the bourgeoisie about war covers all aspects of it, from its sudden nature to the problems of weapons, logistics, etc., which it entails. And since the problem of war can – outside the framework of petty-bourgeois ideology of peace or the extremely selfishly acting temper of the most belligerent parties – be studied and understood, it does precisely so for that reason.

In fact, for us Marxists, war is one of the characteristic elements of the capitalist world: in it, its development makes sense both because it constitutes a vital impulse for its development and because it brings together all the reactionary tendencies struggling against its destruction at the hands of the proletarian class. That is why, in the context of the war clashes, there have been not only the greatest examples of proletarian uprisings, beginning with the Commune of 1871 and ending with the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, but also the most important clashes between genuinely revolutionary forces and those that were (and are) only formally so: before the war, the Second International collapsed because the petty-bourgeois currents that defended their respective states, and their strength within it, represented the impossibility of restoring the organisation in the spirit of its original proletarian aims. The apolitical currents of the workers' movement, syndicalism and anarchism, however, also revealed their real opportunist nature just before war, comparable to that of social democracy: a great example of this was Spain in 1936, when the most powerful libertarian organisation that existed did not resist for more than a couple of days before siding with the republican state against the proletarians in arms.

In 1914, the imperialist war brought the debacle of the Socialist International, the definitive defection of Kautsky and others to the side of the bourgeoisie, but this forced the internationalist minorities to regroup around Marxist theory and the revolutionary programme and to rise in its defence. Out of this collapse, which seemed definitive in August 1914, the Communist International emerged as a major effort to establish the world communist party. But in neither 1936 nor 1939 did forces capable of conquering back lost terrain emerge from an analogous debacle, caused in the first case by libertarian currents and in the second by the combined forces of social democracy and Stalinism: neither did the proletarian class any longer have the strength it had demonstrated throughout Europe in 1917–1919, and was broken by the series of defeats it had suffered at the hands of the bourgeoisie, nor was the counter-revolutionary process initiated in Russia and then throughout the world by Stalinism over, which made it difficult for the small and scattered groups that had opposed this counter-revolution to carry out the necessary balance sheet.

The only current which, thanks to its historical trajectory and its position already against the first signs of the deviation which gave rise to Stalinism in the international communist movement, was able to take up the work which the Bolsheviks, together with a few elements scattered in various countries, took on in 1914–1917 was the Communist Left of Italy. Indeed, every reader of our press can confirm that the problem of the war, its relation to the course of the class struggle of the proletariat and the development of capitalist society, which has always inclined towards it, has from everlasting occupied a prominent place in our publications. The task of our current has always been to set the question of war in its proper terms, both by affirming them and by combating all political currents which, with reference to Marxism, claim that the question of war can be understood from a perspective other than that of historical materialism.

It is precisely against the moralistic conception of war, which regards it as evil in itself, regardless of its historical characteristics, that we have devoted much of our party effort to defining war by classifying it within historically defined types.

The first of these is revolutionary war, i.e. war waged by a rising class against reactionary forces. In the historical phase of capitalism, this type of war has two variants. The first is the bourgeois revolutionary war waged by the national bourgeoisie in countries like France against the old aristocratic-feudal classes. The second is the proletarian revolutionary war, i.e., the war waged by the revolutionary power of the proletariat to defend itself against the aggression of the imperialist powers. Unfortunately, history provides us with few examples of this particular variant, and we will not deal with it now.

The second type, the reactionary war, is that waged by the national bourgeois forces against each other in clashes aimed at plunder and robbery. These are forces which are identical in their class composition, but which are in conflict as expressions of a particular national form. These are the imperialist wars, the great massacres of 1914 and 1939, but also the armed clashes which, since the end of the Second World War, have been waged by the great powers mainly through intermediaries.

Both types of wars had existed side by side: the asymmetrical development of the capitalist mode of production in different regions of the world meant that Europe and North America, for example, were already fully immersed in the imperialist phase of their development, while in some areas of Africa or Asia, national liberation struggles, clear examples of progressive wars in the bourgeois sense, were on the agenda.

Thus, the fundamental variables by which we can characterise wars are two: the historical period and the region in which they take place. Thus, in the Euro-American area, we can trace a long course of revolutionary wars for national systematization: from 1792 to 1871, i.e., from the National Convention (Convention nationale: French revolutionary bourgeois institution, from 1792 to 1795) to the Paris Commune, when the bourgeoisies of France and Germany allied in a single bloc against the rising proletarian class. This is how we described the first steps of this cycle in one of our classic texts:

 

”The wars between France and the subsequent European coalitions, which eventually resulted in the restoration of absolute monarchy, were a crucial stage in the spread of capitalism in Europe, which was not at all prevented by the victory of the feudal armies allied to ultra-capitalist England. Throughout this period of history, the bourgeois revolutionaries not only pursued a policy of patriotism and strained nationalism, but they also swept the nascent proletariat along with them, both being determined to this policy and the ideologies that flowed from it by the social necessity to disperse the last feudal bonds. This does not mean, however, that the civil war between classes vying for power was replaced by the military clash of states and armies. The decisive fact of social development remains the struggle between classes, ignited everywhere in succession, and without it, we would not be able to explain the very development of wars with the new global and mass character of modern militarism. The Jacobins themselves never took the focus of their attention away from the internal struggle, even though they conducted it during the ‘modern battle of Thermopylae’ waged on the frontiers of France, whose Leonidas, General Dumouriez, did not hesitate to betray and ended up as a traitor” (4).

 

One idea should be emphasised from this paragraph: in the period of the bourgeois revolution, when the dominant bourgeois class in a country like France is already confronted by the allied aristocratic classes, the class struggle between the proletarians and the bourgeoisie and between the proletarians and the feudal classes does not disappear: it is, in fact, one of the smouldering hotbeds of the revolutionary power of the bourgeoisie, but there are common goals of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie which can lead to a temporary alliance between the two classes. It is an exceptional situation where history views the defence of national interests on the part of the proletariat not as a step towards its defeat but as a necessary step towards its emancipation; hence Marxism, without ever renouncing its obligation to call for a continuous war against the bourgeois class, sees this alliance, which can be summed up in the slogan “strike together, march separately“, as a factor of progress in the sense that it revolutionises feudal social conditions.

The above quoted article from “Sul filo del tempo” continues:

 

”We know that Marxism regarded the wars of 1792–1871 as wars of development, which can be simplistically called wars of progress without falling into the trap of a ‘war of defence’. Indeed, Lenin rightly pointed out that they could also be wars of ‘offensive’ and that in the hypothetical case of wars between feudal and bourgeois states, Marxists could see the action of the more advanced state ‘justified’ ‘regardless of who started the war’. This was a strictly polemical argument aimed at the absurd position of the French and German socialists, who were uniformly in favour of war on the base pretext of ‘defence’; that means: if, at a given historical moment, a given war turned out to be ‘revolutionary’, it ought to be supported even if it was not defensive. After all, if there is a revolutionary war, it is an eminently offensive, aggressive war. This dialectical argument whips into a vivid the shameful hypocrisy of all campaigns that mobilise the masses for war enthusiasm, while pretending that they do not prepare or want war, but that they are obliged to repel it as being prepared and wanted by the enemy.

”Marxism, therefore, has evaluated the wars of the classical period 1792–1871 not according to the moralistic criterion of defence, which is its own antithesis, but according to the effects of these wars on the general development, and many times in its critique it has considered certain military offensive initiatives as useful and accelerating that general development, such as the war of Napoleon III in 1859 and the Austro-Prussian War in 1866. It is therefore not a question of saying that up to 1871 the Marxist Party was for the ‘defence of the fatherland’ or the ‘defence of freedom’, but of something quite different.” (5)

 

This type of “wars of development” did not exist only during the period of national systematization in Europe and North America. The twentieth century also provided illustrative examples, especially in Asia and Africa. Vietnam, Algeria, the Congo and Angola are just a few examples of situations in which the revolutionary war of the national, i.e. bourgeois, type was realised as a stimulus capable of shaking the forces of the imperialist status quo in the respective regions. There it was not the clash between feudal forces and the emerging bourgeoisie, but the clash between the fully developed capitalist forces exercising imperialist domination over these countries and a heterogeneous mixture of bourgeois, petty-bourgeois and proletarian forces. Despite this difference, the same criterion as defined earlier is applied. This is often criticised by claiming that in reality these types of conflicts were simply inter-bourgeois struggles, imperialist in character, in which the more dynamic and emerging bourgeoisie sought to replace the less dynamic old colonial power. This type of objection ignores the role that the national liberation wars played as an accelerating factor in the proletarianisation of broad strata of the peasant population in the colonial areas, that is, as factors liberating the productive forces that would necessarily have to clash with the capitalist order. It also ignores the importance of the emergence of an organised proletariat capable of clashing with its own bourgeoisie. Finally, it ignores the importance of weakening the international imperialist order, which is not immune to these types of shocks and which, to maintain itself, actually required the collaboration of the great powers (and even emerging powers like China). In short, this type of criticism continues to hold the old anti-Marxist position, which denies the variety of historical variables that condition the nature of war conflicts, and which classifies them according to an entirely abstract system incapable of evaluating the circumstances that contribute to them in each situation.

Below we reproduce two paragraphs from our text “L’incandescente risveglio delle ‘genti di colore’ nella visione marxista” (6):

 

”’Indifferentism’ is today obstinately hidden behind the pretext that the uprisings in the colonies are in origin and in ideological (and partly social) content bourgeois and lend themselves to machinations by the opposing blocs of imperialism. This is where the mean subterfuge lies: it is precisely the indifference (which then, on the terrain of class struggles, means defecting to the enemy) of the revolutionary proletariat, and what is worse, of its party, that blocks the path of the process of radicalisation of the uprisings in the colonies, narrows their prospects to the framework of bourgeois programmes and social forces, and thus exposes them to the possibility of cynical exploitation by the big capital residing behind the walls of the White House or the Kremlin! It is the renunciation of taking up the mission entrusted to them not by Marx, Engels or Lenin, but by the history that spoke through them, that leads to the extinguishing of a historical phenomenon so fertile with future potential. For years, almost day after day, the rough fist of ‘peoples of colour’ has been pounding on the doors not of the bourgeois but of the proletarians of the metropolises: and this is no figurative pounding, since the Belgian proletarians of 1961 or the French proletarians of the great strikes of the past years respond and have responded, consciously or not, it does not matter much, to the ‘wave of disorder’ pouring from the forests of the Congo or of the Algerian countryside; this response comes in quivers across the widely expanding proletarian class, it doesn't come from its party, and when it does come, it is the antithesis of the whole glorious revolutionary tradition, it is a whiningly democratic, conciliatory, diplomatic, patriotic response, or it is the no less vile response of the haughty and supremacist ‘indifference’. Bourgeois uprisings! And yet, the first ‘storming’ in the Congo, both in 1945 and in 1959–1960, was the result of gigantic strikes, not of bourgeois but of genuine proletarians; it is not for the first time today that we recall in these pages the history of the Algerian revolutionary organisations, having also socially proletarian backgrounds, which only the capitulation of communism of the metropolis to democracy, to the Popular Front, to the resistance movement, to De Gaulle, made it possible to suffocate and destroy. Wasn't the horizon of February 1848 or February 1917 bourgeois? Wouldn't the Russian ‘first revolution’ have definitively fallen victim to imperialism and war if the Bolsheviks had not taken up the task of going beyond that horizon and would have enclosed themselves in a stupid fortress of ‘indifference’?”

”The Western revolutionary proletariat must regain the time and space tragically lost in chasing the mirage of democratic solutions to a problem that only the communist revolution can crack on a world scale. It cannot demand of the uprisings in the colonies what depends on it alone. But even so it greets them with thrilling passion: even so because, as the only sparks of life in the deadly present, they unhinge the international equilibrium of the established order (we shall see later how the very ‘exploitation of colonial insurrections by imperialisms’ must be taken with many reservations) because they catapult the gigantic popular masses – and this includes the proletarian masses – hitherto surviving listlessly in ‘historyless isolation’ into the arena of history because even if it were possible to reduce these masses – which however the Marxist dialectic rejects – to purely bourgeois uprisings, they would breed in their wombs gravediggers whom the rotten West, immersed in idiotic and murderous affluence, lulls into a slumber even more numbing than that induced by the ‘soothing drug called opium’; in short because they are, in accordance with more than a century of historical tradition, ‘revolutionaries despite themselves’.”

”Which for today's bourgeois and indifferentist radicals, as well as for those whom Marx laughed at in his 1853 letter to Engels, is truly startling, very scandalous: not for us, not for Marxists worthy of the name!”

 

This whole general view of the theoretical problems of war as posed by Marxist doctrine in terms of practical evaluation is not an exercise in rhetoric. It is intended to set down minimum reference points based on which it can be affirmed that by accepting them the basic Marxist position on the problem of war is shared and that, on the contrary, by denying them this position is negated. We therefore refer to these basic texts and to this general guideline to deal with a number of fundamental evaluations.

The first of these is that after the passing of the revolutionary phase of the emerging bourgeoisie and its “progressive” wars, the clashes between bourgeois nations can never again have the character of revolutionary wars, simply because of their adherence to the imperialist scheme described by Lenin.

 

“Imperialism is the highest stage in the development of capitalism, reached only in the twentieth century. Capitalism now finds that the old national states, without whose formation it could not have overthrown feudalism, are too cramped for it. Capitalism has developed concentration to such a degree that entire branches of industry are controlled by syndicates, trusts and associations of capitalist multimillionaires and almost the entire globe has been divided up among the ‘lords of capital’ either in the form of colonies, or by entangling other countries in thousands of threads of financial exploitation. Free trade and competition have been superseded by a striving towards monopolies, the seizure of territory for the investment of capital and as sources of raw materials, and so on. From the liberator of nations, which it was in the struggle against feudalism, capitalism in its imperialist stage has turned into the greatest oppressor of nations” (7).

 

In this sense, imperialist wars play a socially conservative role, impede the development of the class struggle of the proletariat, and therefore bear no progressive role. Neither do the so-called “defensive” wars, in which one power claims to be attacked by the other and therefore demands “popular” support in the name of justice. This type of purely bourgeois propaganda only serves to strengthen the sacred union between the proletarians and the bourgeoisie and facilitates the tying of the former to the defence of the national interests claimed by the latter.

Our second evaluation follows immediately from this. At the present stage of capitalist development, and without denying that in some remote region of the planet war would perhaps be still possible to contemplate, only on a small scale, of a more or less progressive character, the proletarian class has only one watchword to defend itself against bourgeois war: revolutionary defeatism, the struggle against its own bourgeoisie, regardless of other “tactical” or “strategic” considerations. It is obvious that this watchword, this way of dealing with the more-than-certain large-scale military confrontation that will take place in the coming decades, is meaningless unless it is interpreted as a consequence of the political maturation of the proletarian class.

Today it is completely subjugated to the bourgeoisie, both in the political field, in the union field and, of course, in the military field. The war and the preceding escalation of the social contradictions contributing to it will inevitably trigger the weakening of this subjugation.

Nevertheless, in any case, it is the task of the class party to defend in all circumstances the fact that the only acceptable policy for the proletariat is the struggle against its own bourgeoisie because even if this policy has no influence on the proletarian masses today, it contributes to the affirmation not only of the political position but of an entire perspective for the near, but not immediate, future.

This is the third critical point for us: the class party not only denies peace and equality between states as the character of the capitalist mode of production, but considers war to be central to its development. And it defends this outlook among proletarians not only formally, but also by substantiating the truth of this claim with data provided by historical and present-day documentation. Our political struggle in defence of internationalism as the battlefield of the proletariat, against the national framing and the resulting inter-class solidarity, is not an abstract one, but is based on facts demonstrated by reality on a daily basis. Our defence of the necessity of revolutionary struggle makes sense because it derives from a real fact that makes this necessity something objective.

 

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(1) “The French armed are planning for high-intensity war”, The Economist, 31 March 2021.

(2) A think tank is generally conceived as a “laboratory of ideas”.

(3) Cf. the article from the Sul filo del tempo series entitled “Il proletariato e la guerra”, in the brochure Quaderni del programma comunista, No. 3, June 1978. Available in the “Achivi” section of www.pcint.org.

(4) Cf. the article in the Sul filo del tempo series entitled “Guerra e rivoluzione”, published in the then party newspaper “Battaglia comunista”, No. 10, 18–31 May 1950; later also reproduced in the pamphlet Quaderni del programma comunista, No. 3, June 1978. Available in the “Achives” section of www.pcint.org.

(5) Ibidem.

(6) This was the title of the first report delivered at the General Meeting of the Party in Bologna on 12–13 November 1960 (with the general title: Insegnamenti del passato, fremiti del presente, prospettive del futuro nella linea continua ed unica della lotta comunista mondiale) and published in “Il programma comunista”, No. 1, 1961.

(7) Cf. Lenin V. I., Socialism and War, in Lenin Collected Works, vol. 21, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1974, p. 301.

 

 

International Communist Party

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