Call to the Internationalist Revolutionary Conference in Italy June-13-15
Socialist
May 8, 2025 03:33
24
Let's stop the capitalists' race to war with the internationalist class front of the exploited and oppressed masses around the world
Call to the Internationalist Conference against the imperialist war: June 13th to 15th in Naples (Italy)
Eighty years after World War 2 the world working class and proletarians in general are facing, as never before, a shared, and gloomy perspective: the prospect of a new world war, which is evident in the direct intervention of the capitalist powers in interlinked conflicts, while each of them increases its militarization, not only through military budgets but also through growing internal repression, seeking to prepare the conditions for sending workers to die for the interests of “their” capitalist states. More than 30 years ago, bourgeois ideologues proclaimed the final victory of capitalism with the full incorporation of the countries of so-called real socialism into the global capitalist market. This incorporation has not, however, been the “end of history,” but has increased capitalist competition and led to an unresolved crisis since 2008 that coexists with and fuels the decline of the United States, whose state, army, and currency have been for decades at the very heart of the current system of world imperialist domination as the hegemonic power.
It is the increasing capitalist crisis, the result of insurmountable contradictions of the system, that are undermining the domination of capitalists over capital accumulation and social reproduction, and pushing them to resort increasingly to using state support through tariffs, sanctions, embargoes, weaponizing finance, money and currencies. The big transnational monopolies from the old dominating countries of the West are confronting the new monopolistic competitors rising in “emerging” capitalist countries, with China in the first place, but at the same time they are pitted against each other, as we have seen with Brexit and the tendency toward a breakup of NATO between the U.S. and the EU, and tensions between the US and Canada. In this economic struggle, which is taking new forms, they are destroying the political, commercial, and financial institutions that enabled them to rule the world since the post-war period. And day after day, year after year, this exacerbated competition is also transferring to the military level: a generalized rearmament race to brace for the next world war, while they are feeding the war in Ukraine, the genocide in Gaza, the wars in Sudan and Congo – just to mention the bloodiest ones.
The common goal in these industrial, trade, financial and military wars is to grab a bigger share of the wealth generated through the exploitation of workers, poor peasants and nature worldwide. The clashing powers are gathering around the two biggest capitalist powers: the United States and China, which are at the center of the fight, while tensions between the United States and Europe, and even Japan, are intensifying. The alignments of the powers are shifting, as can be seen in the decision to swell the military budgets of the European countries or in the discussion of a trade agreement between China, Japan, and South Korea.
Trump’s U.S., to recover its declining supremacy, is strong-arming the rest of the world, including allies, to submit to its interests with a gangster-like policy of looting minerals, oil, the wealth of other peoples. They are not giving up on their strategy of advancing against China and Russia, although the list of their military defeats is long, starting from Vietnam of fifty years ago to arrive at today’s Ukraine. And there is a direct link between Trump’s proposals for war and territorial expansion and his fascist attempt to militarize society: the hysteria against immigrants and LGBT+ community is part of the social regimentation for war that is fully expressed by the far right that the Trump’s power block promotes internationally.
China, on the strength of its growing manufacturing supremacy and financial surplus, is raising the free-trade flag and enticing other capitalist classes into business deals under Beijing’s Global Development Initiative (giant ports, mega transportation/energy projects, etc.) that leave the local workers massively exploited. European imperialists seek to defend the plundering and militarization of Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, and other regions of the world, while they present themselves as defenders of democracy, multilateralism, and human rights as opposed to Trump's arrogance.
The support of NATO to the Israeli genocide in Gaza, together with the territorial annexations in the West Bank, Syria, and Lebanon to form a “Greater Israel”, are part of the same international confrontation and function as a weapon aimed against China. We reject the bombing and threats toward Yemen and Iran that the US and Israel are intensifying. At the same time we must underline that the expulsion of Zionism will not come from the reactionary regimes of the region, which have collaborated with it in different ways since its creation, but from the united socialist struggle of the exploited and oppressed masses of the Levant. We salute the workers' and popular rebellion against these regimes, as we have seen in Lebanon and the Islamic Republic of Iran, which has exterminated and dispersed a whole generation of brave revolutionary militants and mercilessly oppresses the working class, the poor masses, and disadvantaged women in that country, while hypocritically pretending to support the Palestinian cause.
All big and regional capitalist powers are building up their armies, by increasing their military budgets at the expense of savage cuts to social benefits, from the EU’s € 800 billion plan to the US $ 1 trillion military budget, and China’s steady 7.2% yearly growth, while Japan is revising its disarmament Constitution and making up for the time lost as a defeated power in World War II.
This increasingly accentuated and accelerated tendency to war is the only "solution" that the capitalist class can give to the historical crisis of its social system - a crisis in the process of accumulation and in the political international order that for the first time in history is intertwined with a looming climate catastrophe and an unprecedented crisis of social reproduction and sociality itself, with an impressive and corrosive spread of individualism and violence in inter-personal relationships.
These clashes between big capitalist powers are also becoming increasingly violent in Latin America, mainly as a result of U.S. pressure to contain Chinese economic interests and political influence in the continent, while workers and the masses are subjected to austerity measures and hardship under right-wing governments such as Milei's in Argentina. For Latin American workers and peasants, the alternative does not lie in aligning with the BRICS. Even countries that have experienced great revolutions, uprisings and anti-imperialist struggles (Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela) are experiencing reactionary retreats, as they join a camp which is against the West, but clearly follows the rules of market economy with the exploitation of the working class within them. The common battle to expel old and new capitalist powers raises the struggle for the Socialist Unity of Latin America. At the present time it is necessary and urgent to confront Trump's expulsion of Latin American immigrants in alliance with workers in struggle within the US.
Capitalism can only offer this bleak picture. Millions of workers and humans in general are suffering from this tightened competition in terms of increased exploitation and welfare cuts, and are being killed, wounded, and displaced by wars. In spite of the enormous hatred and resistance generated by the governments of hunger and wars, to date, the response of the working class and the oppressed masses is not enough to stop this race to the abyss, also due to the political bankruptcy of the so-called “Left”, now completely co-opted into the capitalist establishment.
In imperialist countries, as well as in the “global South” mainstream bourgeois parties, as well as most of the so-called “Left”, support preparations for war and measures against the working class. They have sided with the ‘camp’ to which their countries belong, with a minority winking at the opposite capitalist camp. And all of them are maneuvering to drag the workers after them by threat and deception.
This integration of the political and union leadership of the working class into the capitalist state contrasts sharply with the large social explosions, strikes, and mass demonstrations against repressive and austerity policies in various regions of the world, as well as the global emergence of the enormous movement against the Zionist genocide, in support of Palestinian Resistance and the right of Palestinians to return to their homes and lands, in which youth and students play a central role.
Our organizations are among the few that have dared to go against the current and steadily oppose both imperialist camps in the Ukraine war as well as in all other conflicts, taking steps to build the internationalist proletarian camp – a camp potentially including the huge majority of humankind.
The Conference we are calling in Naples on 14 and 15 June is a step forward in this construction work, which some of us began in previous meetings such as the important Buenos Aires Conference in 2024. We call to join all those who rely and put their hopes on the working class and their struggles, not on the power of any existing state – all being capitalist states. We oppose nationalism that ties workers to their exploiters with internationalism, that unites workers with their fellow-workers in other countries.
Liberation of the oppressed people can only be achieved through a struggle led by the working class, never by the capitalists. If we unite internationally, we become a power, a very big power, and attract the support of the exploited masses in all countries. The enormous potential strength of our front of struggle was seen precisely in the international solidarity movement that Palestinian resistance aroused.
Our most urgent fight is against rearmament, militarization of society, war economy and welfare cuts, and against government policies in preparation to war, as well as against the ‘internal war’ for suppression of social struggles, attacks on immigrants, and blaming all hardships on them to divide the working class. Militarism goes hand in hand with state repression while the entire legislative framework/judiciary takes a reactionary direction against labour, social and democratic rights. The dangerous trend of the rise of the far right in a number of countries becomes the battering ram of the bourgeois system of power in order to subordinate class to the nation. This rise is an expression of capital’s aggression against labour and tendencies to question capitalist politics and domination. Against the far-right agenda, the fight for real equality of women and men, the fight against individual and collective patriarchalism, the fight to all forms of racism and discrimination against national and ethnic minorities and LGBT+ people, the fight against environmental destruction, are an integral part of our struggle. The far right has emerged thanks to the social disasters produced by neo-liberal policies and the renunciation of the class struggle by the organizations of the old workers' movement. Class collaboration is not the answer to this, only the united front of the working class, in the streets, strikes, and picket lines, can respond to every blow and defeat their offensives.
In imperialist countries “the main enemy is at home”, and nowhere is the capitalist “enemy of our enemy” our friend!
The Trump Administration is reshuffling the cards, dealing blows on the North American partners and European allies, trying to lure Russia into a partition deal for Ukraine leaving the greedy European warmongers out in the cold. Zelensky does not embody a struggle for national defense; rather, he is a puppet of NATO, placing Ukraine's fate in the hands of his masters. Whether Putin will ever make the “peace” deal or not, the result will be robbery, the sole possible outcome – except for revolution - of a war of robbery. If a treaty of colonial plunder is indeed agreed upon, this will not prevent the march toward war between the big capitalist powers. We stand for the fraternization of Russian and Ukrainian soldiers and workers against imperialist war, and we advocate the overthrow of the Zelensky and Putin regimes, which are both anti-proletarian and anti-communist, against the 1917 Revolution and Lenin’s policy on the national question.
We firmly stand against the U.S. MAGA bullying policies, as against the imperial ambitions the EU and the European governments are attempting to resurrect, whether they ever manage to build the reactionary United States of Europe, or as most likely they rearm separately to the teeth to advance their separate – and competing – interests. We firmly stand against Japan’s rearmament to confront China in alliance with the United States. We denounce the present-day capitalist China, which is not the daughter of the Chinese Revolution, but of the capitalist counterrevolution, the oppressor of the largest working class of the world with its AI police state, and a paradise for the billionaires on a par with the U.S. Nor we can support in any form the military-state Russia using its poorest youth as cannon fodder to try to restore the czars’ empire along with its reactionary role. The BRICS project is not a “multilateral” alternative to Western imperialism, but a contradictory bloc of reactionary and exploitative states.
Faced with our governments’ wars, we take up the best socialist traditions of revolutionary defeatism, we stand for fraternization between soldiers on opposite fronts, for the transformation of imperialist war into revolution that overthrowing the rule of capital and establishing worker’s power puts an end to exploitation and wars, devoting productive forces to the satisfaction of social needs, and not of the greed and profits of the few.
The signing organizations have joined forces to build the proletarian revolutionary camp. We intend to work with all our strength for the rebirth of a new proletarian International that will treasure all the great battles of the past, both the won and the lost ones. The struggle for a revolutionary International is inextricably linked to the building, in each of our countries, of revolutionary parties of the working class. And we can only move forward on this path by banning all forms of chauvinism and opportunism. More organizations will join, as workers’ vanguards choose to stand up not only for a fair wage, but to put an end to the wage slavery, and to reject being cannon fodder for their exploiters.
No to rearmament and war! Stop the genocide in Gaza and the war in Ukraine, Sudan, Congo!
Defend the purchasing power of wages and reduce working hours: work less to work for all!
Freedom for all prisoners and politically persecuted!
United front of workers and oppressed peoples against imperialism, racism and fascism!
For the power of workers and the exploited masses! Let's fight for a classless society without exploitation and oppression! Let's fight for international socialism!
Workers of the world, unite!
