/ Deutsch / Cesky / Español / English / Français /
Source in German: https://actionweek.noblogs.org/post/2024/06/03/vortrag-fur-revolutionare-antikriegsposition/
As part of the anti-war congress in Prague, the German-speaking comrades of the Antipolitical Social Revolutionary Tendency (AST) gave a lecture on Saturday on the topic “For a revolutionary anti-war position”. Here are their theses of the lecture.
Bourgeois peace within capitalism is the non-military form of competitive struggle both within individual States and between them. Internal peace is based on the State’s monopoly on the use of force. For bourgeois ideologues, for example, there is peace in the two democracies of Germany and the USA. And indeed, there is currently no civil war neither in the USA nor in Germany. And yet internal peace within the States means permanent police terror, which is more or less pronounced. The cops are the official hooligans of the State, who are allowed to do what citizens are generally forbidden to do, namely act out the violence in an offensive manner. In the Federal Republic of Germany, deadly cop terror has increased sharply in recent times. In the USA, cops killed at least 881 people between January and October 2, 2022.
Internal peace within capitalist States is therefore nothing but a low-intensity war. It is a one-sided war waged by the State against the petty-bourgeois and proletarian lower classes. Social revolutionaries strive to disrupt the internal peace through proletarian class war.
As a bourgeois ideology, pacifism advocates peace and cooperation between States and their voluntary collective disarmament. This is a mountain of illusions that quickly collapses in the face of imperialist carnage. There is competition between capitalist States and peace between them is merely the non-military form of competition, which is based on arms race. States will never voluntarily disarm collectively to any significant degree. Asking the States to do so is illusory. There can only be one real disarmament: the world revolutionary smashing of all States! Class war instead of bourgeois peace!
In world capitalism, bourgeois peace can only be an interwar period. The pacifists claim that diplomacy is an alternative to imperialist war. They are not particularly irritated by the fact that the diplomats are deployed by the same States that send armies to occupy other countries. Diplomacy is a weapon of non-military competition, where the economic and military potential of States always plays the most important role as their basis. State diplomacy prepares for war in times of peace and for peace in times of war, but fundamentally it cannot and don’t want to prevent war.
If States cannot assert their interests diplomatically and believe they must and can wage war, then they will. But they cannot wage a nuclear war against each other victoriously. That would be collective nuclear overkill. But they can and want to wage proxy wars like that in the Ukraine. Including the danger of nuclear war. This is the prevailing structural madness that bourgeois ideologues call the “international community”. This intolerability can only be overcome by the possible global social revolution that abolishes commodity production and smashes all States in an anti-political way.
The (petty) bourgeois opponents to war are national, while a revolutionary anti-war position can only be anti-national. In Germany, the extreme center leads the indirect military war in the Ukraine as well as the economic war of NATO and the EU against Russia with a lot of passion for democratic human rights fanaticism. German imperialism is fighting for global human rights – especially where it has a score to settle with governments.
The nationalist right-wing “Alternative for Germany” (AfD) and the social-democratic left-wing nationalist “Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance” (BSW) accuse the German government of representing US rather than German interests in the economic war against Russia. The government’s fools are ruining “our economy” by boycotting Russian gas. The AfD and BSW objectively represent the interests of those individual capitals whose economic interests are being undermined by the economic war against Russia.
German industry is not “ours”. We are exploited there as wage earners and sacrificed in global competition. This unites us with our class brothers and sisters all over the world. Revolutionary proletarians do not feel “German”, “French”, “Russian”, “Ukrainian”, “Israeli” or “Palestinian”, but as a part of the world proletariat. As a part of the class that can potentially smash capitalism, revolutionarily abolish itself and give birth to a classless and stateless society!
We, revolutionary proletarians, must fight worldwide against the nationalist, racist, religious and sexist lines of division.
Our solidarity is anti-national. National “liberation” and “self-determination” only create new capitalist States or national autonomy within existing ones. Our solidarity with the Jewish/Israeli and Palestinian civilian population is directed against the Zionist and Islamist warmongers. Social revolutionaries worldwide must fight pro-Zionism and left-nationalist Palestine solidarity. Zionist Israel, like all States, must be smashed by anti-political social revolutionaries if we proletarians want to free ourselves from capitalist exploitation and political management of misery worldwide. Anyone who advocates a Palestinian State – which can only be capitalist – is a structural class enemy of the world proletariat. The Hamas regime in the Gaza Strip gave and gives us a foretaste of how socially reactionary a Palestinian State would be!
Not only Hamas, but also the Marxist-Leninist forces of the “Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine” (PFLP) and the “Democratic Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine” (DPFLP) are part of the nationalist slaughter in which the Israeli and Palestinian wage earners are being incited to battle against each other and slaughtered in large numbers. No solidarity with the Zionist State of Israel and no solidarity with Palestinian nationalism!
We also resolutely combat the national pacifist phrase of “understanding between peoples”. Who are the “peoples”? The class-divided occupants of the capitalist States: bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoisie and proletariat. Behind the ideological “rule of the people” (democracy), which every State claims to be, lies the real rule of the bourgeoisie. “Understanding between peoples” is in reality nothing but the cooperation of States in times of peace – a nice phrase for the time before the slaughter. And in times of war, it practically means: “Peoples”, kill yourself for the benefit of the capitalist nations.
Revolutionaries recommend that the combative world proletariat should break away from the class-neutral “peoples” and unite for the revolutionary smashing of global capitalism – otherwise it will forever remain a maneuvering mass in the inter-State competition, which will be sacrificed in countless massacres. Global class war for the destruction of all nations instead of “understanding between peoples”!
In the imperialist proxy war between NATO and Russia in the Ukraine, anti-fascism plays an important role as a war ideology on both sides. The Kremlin justifies its imperialist war against the Ukraine through the propaganda about its “denazification” and Western warmongers and their petty-bourgeois appendix also use anti-fascism as a war ideology against Russian imperialism. So Antifas are to be found within the Kremlin side as well NATO side. Of course, there are also anti-fascists who do not support either side in the imperialist war in the Ukraine. But fundamentally, anti-fascism is a pro-capitalist and pro-imperialist ideology and practice that has nothing whatsoever to do with revolutionary anti-capitalism.
Social revolutionaries fight democracy uncompromisingly – just like all other forms of State. They fight against fascists, Nazis and military coups and dictatorships, but never they defend democracy. Just as anti-fascism supported democratic regimes against fascist States and military coups during the World War II and the Spanish Civil War, thus helping to organize the great capitalist massacre of the world proletariat, it is also part of the ideologies of justification in the various massacres today.
Anti-fascism stands for democracy as a socially reactionary capitalist form of State against other capitalist forms of State such as military dictatorship and fascism. In the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the World War II (1936-1945), anti-fascism played an important role as a war ideology.
Soviet imperialism in Spain fought the class war from above [TN: i.e. from the exploiters’ perspectives] against the combative proletariat, Trotskyism, and the left wing of the Popular Front much more consistently than against Franco. That’s why it won the first war and lost the second. In May 1937, Stalinism provoked in Barcelona a proletarian class struggle against it through repression against the CNT. The anarcho-syndicalist CNT leadership and the left-wing socialist POUM apparatus put the brakes on the combative proletariat and prevented it from settling accounts with the Popular Front regime. The latter thus remained in political power. The Stalinists smashed the POUM in June 1937. Trotskyism fought the Popular Front regime politically, but supported its social-reactionary war militarily. A genuine social revolutionary current didn’t have to defend the democratic Popular Front regime against the military coup, but had to fight both uncompromisingly. This was what Italian Left Communism – Italian in origin, international in orientation – and the council communist organization in the USA, “Groups of Council Communists”, did at the time. After winning the civil war in 1939, Franco established a military dictatorship, which was transformed back into a democracy after his death in 1975.
Contrary to anti-fascist ideology, even during the World War II, Soviet State capitalism did not wage a “just war”, but also an imperialist one, as proved by the expansion of its rule over Eastern Europe after 1945. Soviet soldiers were killed and killed for the social interests of the national State bourgeoisie. Social revolutionaries had to fight both German and Soviet imperialism. While global Stalinism and Trotskyism supported Soviet imperialism, left and council communists and some anarchists fought all sides of the imperialist slaughter.
This imperialist slaughter generated civilization hotspots worthy of its barbarity such as Auschwitz and Hiroshima. Only Nazis can come up with the idea of relativizing Auschwitz through Hiroshima – but also only completely social reactionary anti-fascists trivialize and relativize Hiroshima through Auschwitz and glorify World War II on the part of the anti-fascist allies as a progressive and just issue! But the anti-fascist Allies had previously co-financed the Nazis (US finance capital), handed over Czechoslovakia to them through the Munich Agreement (Great Britain and France) and divided up Poland with them (Soviet Union)! They did not bomb the access roads to Auschwitz, but they did bomb heavily residential areas in Germany. The World War II was the bloodiest class struggle of world capitalism – including for the State capitalist Soviet Union – against the world proletariat, which let itself be butchered for the goals and interests of its class enemies. The proletarians did not kill each other for the “Aryan race” or for “freedom”, but for the profits of IG Farben and General Motors. During the bloodbath, the latter company armed both the USA and, through its German subsidiary Opel, Hitler’s regime and made a handsome profit. The USA and the Soviet Union were the main winners of the imperialist slaughter. And social reactionary anti-fascism is so cynical as to celebrate as a “liberation” the Allied bombing terror against the civilian population in Germany and the brutal conquest and plundering of Eastern Europe by the Soviet Union!
The capitalist slaughter cannot be ended by pacifist demonstrations. This can only happen through a potential radicalization of the global proletarian class struggle into a world social revolution. The wage earners produce and reproduce the power of capital and the State in the bourgeois labor process. They are also the ones who can potentially destroy this power.
There is still the possibility that in extreme situations the global proletarian class struggle could radicalize into a world revolution. Similar to the European revolutionary post-war crisis (1917-1923). The dynamics of the capitalist crisis and the imperialist First World War led to an extreme impoverishment of the proletariat and the lower strata of the petty bourgeoisie. This was the starting point for the rise of the proletarian class struggle at the end of the First World War in Europe, including mass strikes against the capitalist massacre.
The main lessons that proletarian revolutionaries can draw from the European revolutionary post-war crisis are as follows: Firstly, only the combative proletariat has the power to put an end to imperialist wars. Secondly, however, the capitalist counter-revolution will prepare new wars if the proletariat, which is revolutionarily abolishing itself, does not also end the bourgeois peace within capitalism. The global proletarian class war must give birth to the classless and Stateless world community in order to end the capitalist slaughter of human beings.
Proletarian revolutionaries consciously participate in the struggle of their class in order to radicalize it beyond its limits reproducing capitalism. Intellectual revolutionaries support them in this. Revolutionaries thus provide practical and intellectual impulses for the radicalization of the proletarian class struggle. However, they are always aware that the main impulse for the radicalization of proletarian being and consciousness is always our own collective class struggle.
Mass strikes against the imperialist massacres can only be based on the collective self-organization of wage earners. For example, an indefinite, interprofessional mass strike in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and in all NATO and EU countries is necessary to put a progressive end to the mutual slaughter that Russia and NATO are organizing in the Ukraine based on the division of labor and competition.
Possible mass strikes against the war will have strong revolutionary tendencies and potencies. When the class struggle breaks through its reproductive limits and radicalizes into a social revolution – then the revolutionary class struggle organization of the proletariat is possible and necessary. Today we do not yet know what the revolutionary class struggle organization will look like in concrete terms. We only know that political parties and trade unions cannot be revolutionary. They represent bourgeois-bureaucratic apparatuses whose main tendency is to integrate themselves into capitalism.
By destroying the State in an anti-political way, by transferring the means of production under the control of the society as a whole and by overcoming commodity production, the proletariat then revolutionarily abolishes itself and gives birth to the classless and Stateless community. Since the proletariat in a country, in a group of countries, in a continent cannot possibly wait until their class brothers and sisters are able to do so globally, the world revolution can only be a permanent chain of State dismantling. In the world revolution, therefore, still existing capitalist States and already developing classless and Stateless communities will exist against each other. But there can and must be no peaceful coexistence between them, no trade – not even exchange in kind.
If we consider that the capitalist social reaction has the destructive potential to extinguish all human life, then we know that this cannot be a walk in the park. But the risk of nuclear overkill exists even without a global social revolution. And this risk can only be overcome by a global revolution. Perhaps a victorious world revolution is also possible in the age of nuclear weapons, just as the nuclear powers have so far managed their imperialist competition without committing suicide.
We do not know whether a global social revolution will develop or whether it will be victorious. But even if this is not the case, the only right thing to do is to uncompromisingly fight against capital, the State and the nation, here and now!
English translation: The Friends of the Class War / Die Freunden des Klassenkrieg
