How can we change the world?

The world is turning into a vast graveyard. For several weeks, the Middle East has once again been ravaged by fire and bloodshed. After Gaza, it is now Lebanon and Iran that are being subjected to a deluge of bombs by the Israeli and American states, while the Islamic Revolutionary Guard and Hezbollah fire rockets, drones and missiles towards neighbouring countries. Amid this deluge, civilian populations, held hostage by the imperialist rivalries of all the belligerent nations, are desperately trying to escape death, wandering through the rubble and ruins, stepping over the corpses littering the streets of Tehran, Beirut and many other cities besides.

Unchecked barbarism …

A great swathe of humanity is currently being massacred across the globe. According to the UN, in three years, the civil war in Sudan has caused “more than 200,000 deaths, displaced nearly 14 million people and triggered the worst global food crisis”. In four years, the war in Ukraine, with its 500,000 to 600,000 deaths, military and civilian combined, holds the record for the worst bloodbath on the European continent since the Second World War. Everywhere, wars are generalising, spreading, or just waiting to erupt, with no other outcome than death, destruction and desolation.

As for countries not directly affected by military conflicts on their territory, military spending is skyrocketing. In France, the defence budget is set to rise from 32 billion in 2017 to over 67 billion in 2030. In Britain, this marks the sharpest sustained increase in defence spending since the end of the Cold War.

Against the backdrop of a global economic crisis, the all-consuming cancer of the war economy means cuts to health, education and cultural budgets, the militarisation of the workplace — with workers facing hellish work rates, reduced staff numbers and wage cuts — amidst soaring food and energy prices... Everywhere, in very country, the bourgeoisie calls for these sacrifices to be accepted in the name of the nation’s greater good and peace.

… and dead ends

We must not accept this! Our world has the capacity to feed, house, clothe and care for the whole of humanity whilst respecting the environment. We have the knowledge and the technology. Instead, all social forces are being thrown into destruction: the bourgeoisie gives the orders and the working class pays the price all over the world. So, we must fight! But how?

In March, huge demonstrations took place in the United States and Spain under the slogans ‘No King’ and ‘against the war’. Thousands of genuinely outraged people gathered to protest against the horrors of this world. In reality, they have fallen into a trap: the bourgeoisie knows that a growing section of the working class is asking itself how to fight. It therefore offers its false answers, and pushes many of those who want to take action into dead ends.

That of ‘pacifism’, for example, which distorts the workers’ outrage at the barbarity of war into a sweet melody of defence of freedom and peace… within capitalism. As if this system of exploitation and repression could exist without war. History shows, on the contrary, that the logic of pacifism always leads to war. This is how this ideology served as a justification for social democracy to participate in the First World War. Because it was supposedly a conflict forced by ‘the other side’, the ‘warmongers’, the ‘barbarians.’ In short, one had to allow oneself to be conscripted in turn to defend ‘democracy’, ‘civilisation’ and ‘peace’.

Then there is democracy itself, another asset of the bourgeoisie, “a form of capitalism that would bring happiness, prosperity and peace… but which dictatorship would try to destroy”[1]. In reality, democracy is just as barbaric: the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, napalm in Vietnam, electric torture in Algeria… these horrors are crimes committed by the great democracies. Whether left-wing, right-wing, democratic or authoritarian, all capitalist states massacre, torture, deport, imprison, starve…

Since 1914, war and its preparation have been at the heart of decadent capitalism. The capitalist system survives the ravages of competition only through the increased exploitation of the working class. It has no choice to offer the proletariat other than that of one nation at war with another, that of one economic power competing with others, that of one side of the border against the other. Capitalism is war! And exploitation is death and misery!

Only one way: the class struggle

To counter this deadly dynamic, we must fight and oppose all the sacrifices demanded of us by the bourgeoisie. It is through our struggles, as an exploited class, that we can create a favourable balance of forces against the ruling class: with class solidarity against the defence of one sector against another; for class solidarity against the defence of one state against another. We must bring down this decaying system: the world proletarian revolution is the only alternative to barbaric capitalism.

Everywhere, the working class is under attack. Everywhere, it has the same interests. Everywhere, it has the same struggle to wage, the same solidarity to build, across borders.

But it is in the industrialised countries of Europe and North America, where the dynamic of militarism is detonating, where the working class has the greatest historical experience, where for decades it has been confronting the traps of democracy and the sabotage of ‘free’ trade unions, it is in these countries where capitalism was born that the working class must show the way to the proletariat of the whole world, by waging a conscious, united and determined struggle against the bourgeoisie and the appalling living conditions it imposes.

Capitalism is leading humanity to its death; only the world proletarian revolution offers an alternative to escape this decaying and barbaric system. The slogan of the Communist Manifesto is more relevant than ever: “Workers have no country. Workers of the world, unite!”

Julie, 13 April 2026