Appeal to the labor movement: THIS MAY FIRST
BUILD PROLETARIAN INTERNATIONALISM
STOP THE INTER-IMPERIALIST WAR
BUILD THE WORLD PARTY OF SOCIALISM
On this May Day, the international working class must ask, “what is the cause of the coming world war and how can we stop it?” As China eclipses the reigning economic and military hegemon (USA), war to redivide the world, despite all pretenses-to peaceful progressive growth, is not only on the capitalist’s agenda-it is their only choice. All the capitalist states prepare for war and are drawn into the unfolding inter-imperialist conflict at the expense of nature and social needs everywhere. The death agony of capitalism commits the world to wars for redivision of resources at the expense of the workers, poor farmers and oppressed.
Regardless of the truth regarding direct responsibility for the outbreak of the war, one thing is certain: the war taking place in Ukraine is the result of the inter-imperialist dispute, developing a qualitative leap in the trade war between the United States and China; it is a predatory war for the division of the world and spheres of influence. The commercial war thus becomes a military war, the political one by other means, namely, violence.
THE IMPERIALIST WAR with its epicenter in EUROPE has lasted for over a year, all the data and movements of NATO and Russia show that far from ending, it ventures as a war of extermination; the balance after one year of THE SAME is the waste of hundreds of billions of euros destined for the destruction of human lives and infrastructure. Displacement of at least 15 million human beings, far from finished, as the equipment is being prepared for continuity with high possibilities of becoming a global catastrophe.
The entire world situation, and consequently also the internal political life of the various countries, are under the threat of war. The approaching catastrophe penetrates the deepest masses of humanity with anguish. Across the planet inter-imperialist conflicts unfold under the hair trigger threat of nuclear war, today in Ukraine tomorrow Taiwan. Capitalism necessitates accumulation of capital at the cost of extinction. As a mode of production its unrestrainable anarchy is destroying nature, the means and forces of production while impoverishing hundreds of millions.
WHILE THE BOURGEOIS GETS RICHER, MILLIONS OF PROLETARIANS AND PEASANTS SUFFER HARDSHIP AND FAMINE.
War is a gigantic commercial enterprise, especially for the war industry. That is why the “top 11 NATO companies” are the first patriots and the main provocateurs of the war. Yet while we shout the slogans ‘Socialism or Extinction!’ and “For Humanity to Survive Capitalism must Die!”, the treacherous leaders of the workers’ organizations work overtime to keep workers in one imperialist camp of the other. The social patriots of the west deny the US/EU role propping up the right wing Maidan and post Maidan regimes to proxy for their strategic encirclement and containment efforts. The social patriots of the east (including their 5th columnists in the west) perpetuate the myth of a China/Russia led anti-imperialist bloc with the “progressive” national bourgeoisies of the global south, with their working classes disorganized and submissive.
CHINA IS NOT THE ‘PROGRESSIVE’ FRIEND OF THE WORKERS AND PEASANTS!
The imperialist war is the continuation and exacerbation of the plundering policy of the imperialist bourgeoisie and their colonial and semicolonial comprador agents. But the US imperialist bloc is not alone in plundering and dividing the world into their spheres of interest. Russia and China have emerged in the 21st century as rival powers to challenge US hegemony. They are not the saviors that the BRIC bourgeoisies and Maoist labour political bureaucrats claim as the ‘progressive’ multipolar alternative that workers can call upon to rescue rotting capitalism and save their jobs and livelihoods.
The restored capitalism in China was able, for a time, to sustain double digit growth, but the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall mocks the CPC’s claims it has resolved the capitalist laws of motion with its hybrid market “socialist” economy; the law of value prevails and Chinese capital is not immune. The accumulation of capital in China is driven by the very laws of motion Marx ascribed to capitalism resisted by workers. After the policy of ‘turning-in’, building empty cities and creating real estate debt bubbles at home, to keep its economic engine burning Chinese capital had no choice but to go outwards. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), outward foreign direct investments which includes unsustainable loans across the global south and into Europe, are objectively anti-labor, union busting and debt burdening all under the guise of ‘Win-Win’ mythology embraced by RT ‘socialists’, the Boli-bourgeois, Stalinists, M-L’s and layers of the comprador bourgeoisie across the global south.
We explode the myth that China and Russia’s economic expansion is a reformist, progressive escape route for capitalism. They cannot escape capitalism’s fundamental contradiction between nature and capitalist society. The class struggle between the social forces and social relations of production, sets the limits to capital expansion. Increasing investment in high tech to raise the rate of exploitation drives down living standards for the masses below subsistence and throws workers onto the rubbish heap. Capitalism cannot produce enough value to maintain profits. Rising mountains of debt can never be repaid and will disappear like bad bets in the global casino. Debt is a symptom of capitalism facing its terminal crisis. The circuit of capital is broken, the forces of production are destroyed along with the ecological basis for human life.
THE ENEMY IS THE BOURGEOISIE AND IS AT HOME!
The struggle of the proletariat against the imperialist war is the continuation and exacerbation of the class struggle. Thus we are witnessing a new bankruptcy of civilization, political reaction, depression, inflation, economic crises, famines, human displacements, degradation. But nature is also in danger and with it humanity.
Drought and extreme heat waves pushed 2.3 billion people into food insecurity in 2022, the majority in Africa and the Asian continent, according to the balance presented by the WMO, which cites the case of India and Pakistan as especially problematic, whose agri-food systems were practically exhausted due to the lack of water, a wave of food insecurity that, added to the supply problems derived from the war in Ukraine, has hit 20 million people in this area. All of this is symptomatic of capitalism’s long developmental decline into terminal crisis over the imperialist epoch.
The 1923 projection of the capitalist curve by Trotsky argued booms would be shorter and busts would be deeper as the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (TRPF) accelerates across all capitalist economies. The rise of fictitious finance capital (speculation) over industrial (productive) capital expands the claims on social surplus at the expense of the workers. Capitalism both in the imperialist centers and the semi-colonial resource rich states deepens the drive toward war for redivision of the spoils. Neither “neo-liberal” privatization schemes nor the monetary money supply and interest rate schemes have been successful at resolving the crisis. In turn the the bosses put the cost of the crisis on the working classes, the poor and oppressed nations
FOR A NEW WORLD PARTY OF SOCIALISM!
The fundamental content of the politics of the proletariat is therefore the struggle against imperialism and its war. The fundamental slogan of this struggle since the Zimmerwald Left in 1915 is “The main enemy is at home” whether in an imperialist country or in a semi-colonial country. We reject all capitalism’s attempts to divide and rule the workers and poor farmers. Before exhausting, or drowning humanity in blood, capitalism poisons the world atmosphere with toxic vapors of national and racial hatred; we already see this as a product of the migratory displacements that seek to escape from the bombs and the kamikaze drones that fly over the cities, but also from the bad governments that enslave us, while their cynicism goes as far as the prohibition of migration and the imprisonment in false shelters or internment centers, where proletarians are detained for the mere fact of being.
This system must perish, open your eyes, learn not to forget, not forgive and not give in to the exploiters, to those who humiliate us, to those who subordinate us, to those who deny us the slightest possibility of existence. Imperialist war changes the situation and intensifies the class struggle, but it does not change either our objectives or our program for socialist revolution.
DEMANDS
We need a new Zimmerwald Left to mobilise the anti-imperialist left in an international workers united front to smash the imperialists’ warmongering international popular front!
We need to unite the workers of the world, against national, ethnic and gender divisions!
Power to the woman workers, to the youth and all oppressed sections of the working class!
We call for enlisted person’s unions in Russia, Ukraine and all NATO countries to strike and fraternize as class brothers and sisters!
Expose the commanders, elect your own officers and abandon the projects of the imperialists! The commanders and imperialists do not fight for your national liberation! To win national liberation the victorious class struggle of socialist internationalism is required, not the patriotic fiction of unity with your boss!
We need a new party of world socialism to lead the fight to turn the imperialist war into a class war for socialist revolution! We need a world party based on the method and programmatic content of the Transitional Program of 1938.
We need to unite the workers of the world against national, ethnic and gender divisions!
Power for women workers, for the youth and all the oppressed sectors of the working class!
We are for the class struggle unions, the workers’ councils, the workers’ militias, etc., that fight and are managed democratically, up to and including the insurrection by a Government of workers and poor peasants!
For a world union of socialist republics!
International Leninist Trotskyist Tendency/Tendencia Trotskista Leninista Internacional (CWG NZ/Ao, CWG USA, RWG (Zim), GTR (Br))
April 30 2023
