Call from the communist left: down with the massacres, no support to any imperialist camp! No to pacifist illusions! For proletarian internationalism!

The present imperialist bloodbath in the Middle East, is only the latest in over a century of almost permanent war that has characterised world capitalism since 1914. 

The multi-million massacres of defenceless civilians, the genocides, the reduction of cities, even entire countries to rubble have brought nothing except the promise of more and worse atrocities to come. 

The justifications or ‘solutions’ proposed by the various contending imperialist powers, large or small, to the present carnage, like all those before it, amount to a gigantic deception to pacify, divide and prepare the exploited working class for fratricidal slaughter on behalf of one national bourgeoisie against another. 

Today a deluge of fire and steel is raining down on the people living in Israel and Gaza. On one side, Hamas. On the other, the Israeli army. In the middle, workers being bombed, shot, executed and taken hostage. Thousands have already died.

All over the world, the bourgeoisie is calling on us to choose sides. For the Palestinian resistance to Israeli oppression. Or for the Israeli response to Palestinian terrorism. Each denounces the barbarity of the other to justify war. The Israeli state has been oppressing the Palestinian people for decades, with blockades, harassment, checkpoints and humiliation. Palestinian organisations have been killing innocent people with knife attacks and bombings. Each side calls for the blood of the other to be spilled.

This deadly logic is the logic of imperialist war! It is our exploiters and their states who are always waging a merciless war in defence of their own interests. And it is we, the working class, the exploited, who always pay the price, with our lives.

For us, proletarians, there is no side to choose, we have no homeland, no nation to defend! On either side of the border, we are the same class! Neither Israel, nor Palestine!

Only the united international proletariat can put an end to these increasing massacres and the imperialist interests that lie behind them. This unique, internationalist, solution, prepared by a handful of communists of the Zimmerwald Left, was validated in October 1917 in Russia when the revolutionary working class struggle overthrew the capitalist regime and established its own political class power. By its example October inspired a wider, international revolutionary movement that forced the end of the First World War. 

The only political current that has survived the defeat of this revolutionary wave and maintained the militant defence of internationalist principle has been the Communist Left. In the thirties, it preserved this fundamental working class line during the Spanish war and the Sino-Japanese war while other political currents like the Stalinists, Trotskyists or Anarchists chose their imperialist camp that instigated these conflicts. The Communist Left maintained its internationalism during the Second World War while these other currents participated in the imperialist carnage that was dressed up as a fight between ‘fascism and anti-fascism’ and/or defence of the ‘Soviet’ Union. 

Today the meagre organised militant forces of the Communist Left still adhere to this internationalist intransigence but their scant resources are further weakened by fragmentation into several different groups and a mutually hostile, sectarian spirit. 

That’s why, in the face of an increasing descent into imperialist barbarism these disparate forces must make a common declaration against all imperialist powers, against the calls for national defence behind the exploiters, against the hypocritical pleas for ‘peace’, and for the proletarian class struggle that leads to the communist revolution.

WORKERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!

 

International Communist Current

Internationalist Voice

17.10.2023

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Why this appeal?

 

Only 20 months ago, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a similar common statement was proposed to the Communist Left groups by the ICC. The groups that did sign it apart from the ICC – Istituto Onorato Damen, Internationalist Voice, International Communist Perspective (South Korea) – have subsequently produced two Discussion Bulletins of Groups of the Communist Left debating their respective positions and differences and have held public meetings in common.  

However, other Communist Left groups refused to sign the appeal (or didn’t reply at all) even though they agreed with its internationalist principles. Given the yet greater urgency of defending this principle in common today we ask these groups - listed below - to reconsider and sign this appeal.

One argument against signing the common statement on Ukraine was that other differences between the groups were too great to permit it. There’s no denying the existence of these important differences, whether on questions of analysis, theoretical questions, conception of the political party, or even on the conditions of membership for militants. But the most urgent and fundamental principle of proletarian internationalism, the class frontier that distinguishes revolutionary political organisations, is vastly more important. And a common statement on this question does not mean that the other differences are forgotten. On the contrary the Discussion Bulletins show that a forum for debate of them is possible and necessary. 

Another argument was that a more practical influence of the internationalist perspective in the working class, wider than a mere appeal limited to the Communist Left, was needed. Of course all internationalist militant communist organisations want more influence in the working class. But if internationalist organisations of the Communist Left are not even able to practically act together on their fundamental principle at crucial moments of imperialist conflict how then do they expect to be taken seriously by wider sections of the proletariat?[1]

The present Israel - Palestine conflict, more dangerous and volatile than all the previous ones, coming less than two years after the reemergence of imperialist war in Ukraine, and alongside many other imperialist conflagrations that have recently been reignited (Serbia/Kosovo, Azerbaijan/Armenia, and the increasing tensions between the US and China over Taiwan) means that a common internationalist statement is even more pressing than before. 

That’s why we directly and publicly ask the following groups to show their willingness to co-sign the statement against the imperialist war printed above, which can then if necessary be amended or reformulated according to its common internationalist purpose:

To:

ICT (Internationalist Communist Tendency)

PCI (Programma Comunista)

PCI (Il Partito Comunista)

PCI (Le Prolétaire, Il Comunista)

IOD (Istituto Onorato Damen)

 

Other groups outside the Communist Left who agree with the internationalist positions defended in this appeal can announce their support for this appeal and distribute it.

 

 

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[1] For an in-depth debate on these arguments, see Correspondence on the Joint Statement of groups of the Communist Left on the war in Ukraine