Internationalist Statement on the World Situation
We are entering a historical period in which contradictions are accelerating and accentuating. A bridge period between the erosion of the counterrevolution that took root in the twenties of the last century, a counterrevolution which had already experienced a shock in the 60s and 70s that confirmed the fall of the Stalinist governments of Eastern Europe (the countries of the misnamed «real socialism», which were capitalist countries) and the coming revolution. Moreover, the contradictions of capital, temporarily attenuated through the socialization of capital and World War II, finally exploded in the 1970s and since then the problems of over-accumulation of capital have only intensified. Capitalism has pushed its problems unto the future, aggravating the breadth and depth of the crisis through which it is going. Capitalism has sought to solve these problems through increasing State debt and developing fictitious capital in the financial markets. But these are short- and medium-term oxygen pumps that prepare increasingly acute crises, as was already seen in the 2008 crisis. The fact is that the basis on which the movement of capital is based, the production of value, is undermined by the substitution of living labor for dead labor (constant capital).
The accentuation of the crisis of capitalism is accompanied by the general decline of the hegemonic power that emerged from the ashes of World War II, the United States, and the rise of an aspiring world power, China. In economic and military terms, we are witnessing the formation of imperialist blocs around the two aforementioned powers. However, the future generalized war will not have the same beneficial effect for capital as the last world war, since the material foundations on which the accumulation of capital rests are increasingly brittle. To all the critical elements previously defined we must add the ecological catastrophe that capitalism generates endogenously by virtue of its predatory and productivist nature. Moreover, one of the counter-tendencies to overcome the problems of the valorization of capital involves expanding markets and, therefore, the production and distribution of goods, which will require ever-greater supplies of energy and raw materials.
All these elements produce a social polarization that is increasingly pronounced. Marx had pointed out that an epoch of social revolution begins when the social relations of production become an obstacle to the development of the productive forces, of the production of social wealth. Well, we are entering that epoch, a bridge epoch between the past counterrevolution and the future revolution. Obviously, Marx understood that a revolutionary epoch or era is not the same as a revolutionary situation or a revolution. We are witnessing the development of different rebellions and revolts in recent years, very confused with respect to their political and class perspectives (and it could not be otherwise), but which allow us to reopen the historical experience of the proletariat, the emergence of revolutionary minorities and the intervention of communist minorities in these processes. It is in this context that it seems to us very important to intervene, to assist in the programmatic clarification of political positions. For this reason, we write and publish this joint statement between our three internationalist communist groups.
Global Tendency Towards Imperialist War
From one end of the planet to the other—from the Caucasus to Central Africa, from the Levant to the waters of the South China Sea—capitalism covers the whole world in a series of intractable and bloody conflicts, while it prepares the ground for the outbreak of new conflicts that promise, by their destructiveness and sheer scale, to dwarf the present ones into utter insignificance.
We have already seen the horrific images on television and on the Internet: the mass graves; the miles of rubble—an apocalyptic vision of the future this system has in store for us; entire families torn apart by bombs; little children who will never grow up to have any kind of future because they have been burned alive or executed in cold blood by sniper fire, et cetera, ad nauseam. From Gaza to Syria, from Sudan to Congo, the brutal and inhuman capitalist war threatens to extinguish the living conditions of our species. And behind this mass extinction of human life, behind this organized butchery that our exploiters and executioners still deign to call «civilization», is the impersonal dictatorship of capital, ever more totalitarian in its structure, which rewards and gives raison d’être to the slaughter and cruelty currently on display.
All the major world and regional imperialist powers, as well as their smaller and less powerful bloc allies, driven by the need to conquer new export markets (in which to dump surplus goods), new sources of raw materials and labor power (to reduce production costs, to safeguard and advance their position within the world economic system, in order to be able to fix the conditions of exchange for their exclusive benefit), participate with glee in the bloodbaths that surround us while they conspire to organize those of tomorrow. One only has to take a look at some of today’s major theatres of war to see clearly what is happening.
Faced with a credible military threat from a major regional adversary like Russia, the United States and its coalition of European NATO states have demonstrated their dedication to wearing down the forces of their enemy by providing technical, weapons and intelligence support to Ukraine in a conflict whose conclusion looks increasingly inevitable. Despite near universal condemnation at the time of the invasion and the punishing sanctions regime that was imposed upon it, the worst consequences of which appear to have been avoided through a combination of astute monetary policy and steady revenues from oil and natural gas exports, Russia appears well positioned to win the conflict in Ukraine, while it is still able to project enough power abroad to move its «chess pieces» and continue to make life difficult for its imperialist adversaries.
Besides the Sahel states (Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger), whose newly minted military governments—the product of a protracted internal armed conflict against Islamist/Salafist insurgency—are advised by Russian mercenaries in opposition to the ECOWAS (Economic Community of West African States) bloc, more aligned with the United States and the EU, Russia has forged close alliances with Iran, which remains one of its main arms suppliers, and North Korea, with whom it has signed a mutual defense treaty, and which recently sent some 10,000 troops to help Russia regain control of Kursk.
Meanwhile, Israel’s war in Gaza continues to widen, threatening to engulf and drag in not only the United States, its patron state, but also its European allies in one way or another. From brief and limited rocket exchanges with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, the Israeli offensive has now moved on to all-out bombardments of apartment blocks, villages and other areas of Beirut, resulting in more than 3,000 dead and the displacement of nearly 2 million people, applying in Lebanon the same tactics of total war it has been carrying out in Gaza with no end in sight. As a backdrop to all these deaths, Iran and Israel continue to launch deadly missile attacks against each other, moving up the escalation ladder to open warfare, with Israel striking not only against Iranian operatives, Shiite militias and other proxy groups in the Middle East, but also within Iran itself. Iran has responded in kind, launching coordinated attacks inside Israel that overwhelm its missile defense systems and require U.S. air support to mitigate.
The armed exchange between two major regional powers—Israel and Iran—continues to intensify with each passing day and, after months of Israeli air strikes against Hezbollah and the Syrian armed forces that weakened the government’s position, eventually created an opening for rebel forces to carry out a lightning run on Damascus. The Assad regime, which had ruled the country with an iron fist for more than fifty years by imprisoning and murdering all its opposition, is naturally reviled by the civilian population, which has suffered unimaginably in a decade-long civil war, a conflict responsible for more than 500,000 deaths. However, the new «transitional» government, made up of Islamist fighters with known links to Al Qaeda and ISIS, will ultimately be no better and, in fact, the internal situation within Syria could soon worsen. The Syrian Civil war could even be reignited due to ongoing clashes between armed groups with different external backers: whether the US-sponsored PYD/PKK Kurdish militias in northern Syria, the Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army or Tehran-backed Shiite groups. In the Middle East, as everywhere else in the world, capital roars and demands sacrifices. Its hunger will not be satiated no matter how many innocents are put under the dirt.
In addition, there are the ongoing «containment» efforts toward China, which have led the United States and its allies to sign mutual defense and arms support treaties with India, South Korea, Japan, Indonesia, the Philippines and Australia, among other countries, as they work tirelessly to prevent China from achieving regional power status and becoming a major player in global geopolitics.
And looming far in the distance, like a proverbial sword of Damocles hanging over the head of all humanity, hovers the specter of generalized war that threatens to turn into thermonuclear holocaust at every turn. The plight of our species has never been as dire as it is now, and it is the world of capital and the commodity that is responsible.
The Position of Internationalists
There is a latent threat of extinction of our species. The material power of the processes of mass extermination of proletarians within global competition is organized in an increasingly technological way, and therefore tends to drag more extensive areas into its destructive dynamics. These dynamics presuppose the crisis of the world capitalist order and are prepared through the coalescence of two imperialist blocs around the United States and China. All the existing states, and even those still in formation, tend to align themselves on the basis of this general situation. In the face of bourgeois myths, no political or economic sovereignty is possible in the world of capital and all capitalist forces are aligned around some major imperialism. It is enough to see the example of Syrian Kurdistan, which proclaims itself «anarchist» and so far, has allied itself with the United States.
Faced with this, we can only propose one way out: the self-activation of the working class outside the state political and trade union organizations. These organizations in the best of cases politically paralyze the class, reduce its action to the search for a better position within this society and propagate pacifist slogans. And, at worst, they organize the process by which workers are dragged to the battlefield to massacre one another for the defense of the nation. Against this, the proletariat must advocate the overthrow of bourgeois authority (regardless of its republican or monarchical form, of its ruling party, rightist or leftist, of its relation to religion, whether secular, Islamic, Christian, Jewish, etc., of its laws and rights) and its replacement by the proletarian dictatorship, the Commune or (anti)-state. Thus will begin a process of dissolution of all the sources of the separation of human existence and production, putting an end to private property, commodities, states, nations and social classes and, therefore, to wars and armies.
Our appeal is to the old mole which, in the face of the threat looming over the planet, must gnaw at the roots of this civilization which prevents the revolutionary class from recognizing and affirming itself. A revolutionary class which expresses itself as the force of dissolution of this antiquated society and which will transform the imperialist war into civil war. For this it is necessary that the working class breaks the separation between economy and politics, between the struggle for their living conditions and the struggle against the collective power of the capitalist class (the State) and that the corporative strikes give way to the mass strike: a generalized form of struggle that in its territorial extension will allow it to build its own revolutionary organs. Until then, the communists, the most outstanding sector of the proletariat, differentiated from the other proletarians only because in all the conflicts they always defend the general and historical interests of our class as a whole, must reject, even if it is against the tide, all political compromise with the different national blocs and the ideology of the lesser evil. And they must support the sabotage of militarism and desertion on all fronts (making war against war). That is why it is important to defend a perspective of revolutionary defeatism that understands that the enemy is not simply in our country, but in the whole of the world bourgeoisie in any of its different factions.
«Imperialism is not the creation of any one or of any group of states. It is the product of a particular stage of ripeness in the world development of capital, an innately international condition, an indivisible whole, that is recognisable only in all its relations, and from which no nation can hold aloof at will.» (Rosa Luxemburg, Junius Pamphlet).
Balance and Avante
Barbaria
League of Internationalist Communists
Dated January 4, 2025