Convincing of the crisis of capitalism and the threat of generalized imperialist war are no longer real priorities for the consistent revolutionaries of the International Communist Left. The bourgeoisie itself no longer claims that prosperity for all is just around the corner. Nor does it hide the need to prepare for war. There is no doubt that there are still sectors of the capitalist class and proletariat, and even more so in the petty-bourgeois strata, who refuse to face up to the coming tragedy, but the most conscious and determined sectors of both bourgeoisie and proletariat, especially their political expressions, know where the capitalist world is running. To general war.

The hesitation or blindness that may persist in the ranks of the proletariat in the face of the historical tragedy are reflected – indirectly, of course – in the divergences and debates on crisis and war that pervade the proletarian camp. The fact that an organization of the Communist Left such as the International Communist Current (ICC) continues to deny that there is a dynamic towards generalized war is an expression of this. Overall, however, the central stake between bourgeois ideology and revolutionary proletarian theory no longer concerns crisis and war. It is about the historical course: is war inevitable? Can it be opposed? Can it be prevented? And if so, how? Who can do this? What force?

Marxism has always maintained that only the international proletariat can rise up against imperialist war. As an exploited class, production for and preparation for war aggravates the exploitation of labor by capital. Any defensive struggle against the working conditions imposed by war is in itself, objectively, resistance and opposition to it. As a revolutionary class, it is the only social or historical force capable of destroying capitalism, which embodies generalized imperialist war. In short, the proletariat’s struggle against capitalist exploitation is also a struggle against imperialist war, when the latter is on the agenda. Because “in every strike there lurks the hydra of revolution”, a phrase Lenin took from a Prussian Minister of the Interior [1], only the proletariat can fight, not against war and for peace, i.e. on the terrain of pacifism, but to transform imperialist war into class war, i.e. on the terrain of proletarian internationalism.

However, the proletariat of Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Palestine, the Middle East and Africa have shown, and continue to show, their powerlessness in the face of the wars they suffer directly at work and on the military fronts. More broadly, the international proletariat is also failing to thwart the march towards generalized war. The same is true of the workers’ strikes and struggles on every continent, the massive proletarian mobilizations that took place in Great Britain in 2022, in France in 2023, and the succession of strikes in North America over the last two years, culminating in the auto strike “launched” and sabotaged by the UAW union. Worse still, the American bourgeoisie, guided by the Democrat Biden, who came to lend the union a hand on the picket lines, succeeded in turning the strike into a moment to adapt the American industrial productive apparatus and frame part of America’s proletariat in preparation for war. [2]

It would be pointless to deny the limitations of these workers’ struggles. They have been unable to challenge the initiative of the unions and bourgeois forces acting within the working class milieu, and to oppose the sabotage by these forces of workers’ struggles when there is a workers’ struggle, which is far from always being the case. Today, the international proletariat is not in a position to offer an alternative to capitalism and war. A view based on this static photograph can only provoke skepticism and fatalism, not only in its own ranks, but also among individuals, proletarian or otherwise, and groups “inhabited” by revolutionary hope, whatever the latter may be.

Once again, this “feeling” of powerlessness in the proletarian ranks can be echoed and expressed in one way or another within the forces of the proletarian camp, and even within the Communist Left itself: the proletariat is totally subjugated. It is powerless in the face of war. Or it is defeated and war is inevitable. Or, conversely, the static photo may provoke an act or profession of faith and revolutionary phrase-mongering devoid of political meaning: the proletariat is not defeated, or the bourgeoisie cannot move towards generalized war because the working class is not defeated. In this case, a simple data-point of the historical equation is transformed into an absolute schema.

This difficulty in seeing beyond the photo, considering only the immediate – real – weakness of the proletariat, weakens and undermines the conviction of revolutionaries, groups, circles, more or less conscious individuals, in the proletariat’s revolutionary character and its ability to rise up and oppose the dynamic of generalized war. Added to this is the fact that the bourgeoisie, its media and propagandists are not idle, but are hammering home the point that the revolutionary proletariat is impotent or even non-existent. Above all, it does not hesitate to have its leftist forces occupy the terrain of pacifism.

Dangerous, too, even if of a different nature, are the “radical” but nevertheless pacifist initiatives of genuinely revolutionary militants and individuals, including and even more so when they display anarchist political radicalism. There is no doubt that the vision of a powerless proletariat, or even its absence from the photo, can only fuel both despair and adventure for the most outraged. The Prague Anti-War Congress Appeal is an expression of it. [3] Its object is “the coordination of direct actions to sabotage the war machine”, with no reference to the proletariat and even less to the reality of the balance of power between classes. As it stands, this congress, should it achieve a modicum of success, runs the risk of drawing individuals and circles, often anarchists, into the adventurism and activism of the revolted petty-bourgeoisie. The role and responsibility of the Communist Left is both to warn participants of the danger and political impasse of what is, in the final analysis, no more than the expression of “radical pacifism”, and to offer them the alternative of proletarian internationalism as it can be expressed today, i.e. in terms of the real balance of forces between classes and its dynamics. To date, our participation in this congress has taken the form of a Public Address that we have sent to the participants. [4] It advances the class alternative of proletarian internationalism represented by the NWBCW committees called by the ICT, however modest and limited they may be, to which we have adhered. Of course, it is not exclusive, and any other initiative clearly situated on the terrain of class struggle should be taken into consideration and debated.

Against static, one-sided visions leading to fatalism or voluntarism, we must reaffirm that there is not “a struggle of the proletariat”, but a “struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat”, the struggle of/between classes and not “of class”. Today, it is and will be increasingly determined by the “march to generalized war”. Such is the inevitable course of history. Every national bourgeois is redoubling its attacks on “its own” proletariat, and will continue to do so. It is the necessity for preparing for imperialist war, and no longer simply the defense of the competitiveness of one national capital in the face of another, that becomes the primary concern of every national capital in the face of the proletariat. Armament production, revival of war industries, explosion of military defense budgets, all at the cost of a debt burden approaching the abyss – crisis and war feeding off each other, as we have said before – that will dictate the terrain and timing of the class confrontations that the bourgeoisie is obliged to provoke. Added to this will be the need to impose both social discipline and the mobilization of large masses of soldiers for the massacres on the front lines, in the long term for most countries, and even today for Russia, Ukraine and Israel.

Contrary to a schematic view that historical proletarian defeat would be an absolute precondition for war, we cannot rule out the possibility that, pressed by the crisis and driven by the logic of imperialist and military rivalries, the bourgeoisie might be forced to launch into generalized war without taking care to inflict on the proletariat an ideological, political and bloody defeat beforehand. In that case, the bourgeoisie would be taking a greater risk, the very one it experienced during the revolutionary wave of 1917-1923. The same risk against which it protected itself by inflicting political defeat and bloody terror in the 1930s.

Admittedly, this historic risk could prove insignificant in the event of a widespread nuclear war destroying the planet. But we are not there yet. There will be class confrontations. All the more reason, then, for revolutionaries to prepare themselves as best they can, so that the proletariat can respond as effectively as possible; that is, and to put it simply, so that it can seize en masse the orientations and slogans put forward by communist groups. To achieve this, it needs a material political force capable of defining, carrying and diffusing orientations and slogans to the masses – and of rigorously defending proletarian internationalism against all forms of pacifism. It must set up its own political party, the World Communist Party.

The fight for the latter, which communist groups must take up, is also an element and a factor – ultimately the main one – in the evolution of the balance of forces between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, of the historical course.