The class position of the proletariat against imperialist war in any country, in Russia and in Ukraine, in Europe and in America, in China, in Japan and throughout the Orient, in Australia and in Africa, is only one: class struggle, above all against its own bourgeoisie, and class struggle against the bourgeoisies of all other countries. Proletarians of the whole world unite, means exactly this!

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The war that Russia has unleashed against Ukraine is an imperialist war that is currently confined to Ukraine and directly affects European countries. The imperialist characteristics of this war have inevitably dragged the countries of Western imperialism, especially the United States and Great Britain, and all the countries of the European Union into it. However, this war has its roots much further back in history. We should go back to 1991–1992, to the collapse of the USSR and the intensifying world chaos that was unfolding on the wave of capitalist crises that had convulsed the world since the great global crisis of 1975.

Russia in that time, within five years, thus lost its dominance over the countries of Eastern Europe, which represented for Russia what the countries of Latin America represented in a sense for the USA at that time: the so-called backyard, in which the dominant country dictates the laws with its imperialist policies and its unavoidable “iron heel”. It has also lost control over the countries of the Caucasus and the Russian East. What it has not lost, however, is its historical tendency to extend its dominion into the neighbouring areas of its “Eurasian continent”. Towards Europe, it has tried to regain control of Belarus and Ukraine; in the former case it succeeded, in the latter it did not. The counter-move prepared by the European Union and the United States (through integration into the EU and NATO) was successful in virtually all the former Eastern European Soviet republics. Ukraine was supposed to be the important country with which the “democratic” West would close the European military frontier of the Russian Bear.

The tirade about the “demilitarization” and “denazification” of Ukraine, which Putin's Russia trotted out to justify its war, was a primitive attempt to pass off a robbery war as a “patriotic” war to defend Great Mother Russia from the attack that the Western powers were preparing, using Zelenskyy's “Nazi” Ukraine as a NATO expedient to subjugate the Russian state to the interests of the imperialist West.

There is no doubt that imperialist interests are at play, and that these interests are a combination of economic and military-political factors. The mineral reserves of the Donbas, the great fertility of the soil which makes Ukraine one of the world's largest grain exporters, and the country's strategic position in relation to the Azov and Black Seas are sufficient reasons why first Tsarist and then Stalin's and imperialist Russia have always sought to dominate this nation.

The Russian propaganda stressing the defence of Ukraine's pro-Russian population and accusing the Zelenskyy government of suppressing it as a pro-Russian element intending to “Ukrainising” it at any cost was the counterpart of the Ukrainian propaganda of independence and national sovereignty, which it had “won” after the collapse of the USSR and which the pro-Russian population of Crimea and the Donbas was challenging. In the face of the Russian coup de main by which Moscow annexed Crimea in 2014, the government in Kyiv, backed by the Western imperialists and spurred on to oppose economically, politically and militarily the pro-Russian provinces of the Donbas claiming autonomy, has increasingly linked itself to Washington, London, Berlin, Paris and Rome in order to accelerate its path to membership of the European Union and NATO.

In the eight years that have passed since Crimea's annexation to Russia, this conflict could not but escalate, and the tension between the two countries has reached the level of a war clash.

The Russian proletarians and the Ukrainian proletarians were the target of propaganda aimed at this war clash, both on the Russian and the Ukrainian side, as evidenced by the fact that at the same time the government in Kyiv was arming itself thanks to substantial support, mainly from the USA, Great Britain, France, Germany and Italy. From 2014 to the end of 2021, the US alone supported the Kyiv government with over $4.6 billion, of which $2.5 billion was for armaments (1). However, Western armaments have not only been going to Kyiv. Despite the grandiose proclamations of peace and the sanctions imposed on Russia for “attacking Ukrainian national sovereignty” by annexing Crimea, no less than 10 countries (France, Germany, Italy, Austria, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Finland, Slovakia and Spain) exported €346 million worth of arms to Russia between 2015 and 2020, with France accounting for the largest share with €152 million, closely followed by Germany with €121.8 million. Italy, however, was not left behind; the Renzi government, of which Paolo Gentiloni was minister, sold ground armoured vehicles to Russia for €25 million in 2015, and the Draghi government, of which Di Maio was minister, sold arms and ammunition to Russia for a further €22 million in 2021 (2). So much for the trumpeted peace and sanctions against the Russian aggressor!!! Business is business!

The bourgeois governments, whether European, American or other countries, have shown for the umpteenth time that all the talk of peace, of the values of democracy that must be defended, has only one great purpose – to conceal the real essence of bourgeois power, the real essence of capitalism, on which the bourgeoisie has built its power: the pursuit of profit and imperialist domination over the weaker nations. And for these purposes, they unscrupulously add “fuel to the fire” and sell weapons of all kinds to both belligerent countries. But it is not Capital that is losing out, it is not the capitalist system; it is the proletarian masses, the civilian population, who are massacred in the bombing and forced to flee like frightened beasts; populations who, when they try to take refuge in places and countries where there is no war, end up anyway in the jaws of the same imperialist scoundrels who have instigated and prepared the war.

The European proletarians, who are directly involved in the Russian-Ukrainian war, and who are appealed to by all governments to submit to undertaking the economic and social sacrifices necessary to provide aid to Ukraine in its “defensive war”, have no common interest with their ruling bourgeoisie, who, even through this war, are trying on the one hand to succeed as much as possible commercially and to support the economic recovery threatened by the war itself due to lost exports by shifting an even greater burden on the living and working conditions of the proletarians; while, on the other hand, these bourgeoisies are trying to bind their proletarians still more closely to the policy of class collaboration, which is necessary for making profits in time of peace, but all the more necessary in time of war because when the “call to arms” comes, the bourgeoisie of each country will want a disciplined proletariat ready to meet the demands of national capitalism in its struggle with the competing capitalisms of other countries.

It is the historical interest of the proletariat to free itself from the exploitation to which it is subjected in bourgeois society, to free itself from the wage slavery which forces it to subsist only on the condition of its subjugation to bourgeois production and social relations, and which forces it to become cannon fodder whenever the ruling bourgeoisie enters into armed conflict with foreign bourgeoisies. This historical interest, which is based on the class antagonism inherent in capitalist society, thus becomes the task of the proletarians in all countries to carry out the revolution in the whole society of capital from top to bottom.

The struggle for life, or rather for survival, which every proletarian is forced to wage throughout his or her life under the domination of the bourgeoisie, thus becomes class struggle, i.e. the struggle of all proletarians as wage-labourers, regardless of their age, sex, nationality or profession, to bring down once and for all the economic and social system which, from birth, places them in the position of the subjugated class, the exploited class, the dominated class; and to clear the way for an economic and social system in which there will no longer be ruling classes and dominated classes, exploitation of Man by Man, and hence mutual antagonisms between classes, competition and war. This goal is not utopian, it is not a fantasy outside reality, for the simple reason that it will be the historical outcome of the very reality of capitalism and the bourgeois society based on it.

Wage labour is the characteristic feature of bourgeois society, of capitalism. It did not exist before bourgeois society, and it will not exist after bourgeois society is overcome. Associated labour and the application of science to production, with its constant technical revolutions, i.e. big industry, and the generalisation of communication and relations between the different countries of the world, will constitute the basis of the contribution of contemporary society to its transformation into a society without classes, without exchange values, without money and without commercial competition; into a society in which waste, harmful production, pollution and conflicts between countries and peoples will no longer exist because the economic foundations for waste, harmful production, pollution and conflicts between countries and peoples will be abolished and replaced by economic foundations that will serve not markets, not capital, not stock exchanges, not capitalist profits enjoyed by a tiny handful of bourgeois to the detriment of the lives of the broad masses of the world, but the life needs of the billions of people who inhabit this planet.

This is undoubtedly a great historical objective; only the proletarian class, the real class of producers of all social wealth, will be able to realise it. To achieve this great objective, the proletariat must set it out for itself, must feel it as a necessity of life, and to do so, the proletariat must fight against the enemies who prevent it from taking this path, must prepare itself for the classist struggle, must train in this struggle together with its class brothers, with proletarians of all ages, of all nationalities, men and women, must gain direct experience in the use of the means and methods of the classist struggle (i.e. those by which exclusively proletarian immediate and more general interests are defended) to be able to recognise itself as an integral part of the one great international army and to recognise the class enemies. Class enemies who are not only the capitalists, the possessors of land, products, money, political power, but also the opportunists, those who pose as representatives of the workers but in reality act as gravediggers of the proletarian struggle, saboteurs of the proletarian struggle, and who deny class independence and promote collaboration between the classes. The lessons of history in these areas are numerous and form part of the theoretical and political armoury of the only real representative of the historical interests of the proletariat on the entire planet: the class party, the revolutionary Marxist party, which does not allow itself to be cajoled by democracy, nor to be duped by a supposedly “fairer” distribution of social wealth, and certainly not by that small dose of compassion and goodness that is supposed to slumber in the heart of every bourgeois, every capitalist, every warmonger.

Just as the time came for the bourgeois class, in its struggle against the aristocratic nobility, the clergy and against every monarchy, to overthrow their power and replace them at the head of society, and to boost the development of a new capitalist economy against the old feudal and isolationist economy, the time will come for the proletarian class, in its struggle against all bourgeois oppression, all capitalist economic and social oppression, to overthrow the power of the bourgeois class as the last class representing the prehistory of humanity, that is to say, the last of the societies divided into opposing classes that humanity has known in its long and thousand-year historical course.

Well, to fight the bourgeois war, which for more than a hundred years has been nothing but a robbery and imperialist war, either the proletarians succeed in reacting against the hitherto unchallenged domination of the imperialist bourgeoisie, or they are condemned to suffer, war after war, peace after peace, the increasingly tragic consequences of the inevitable crises of capitalism. The bourgeois war does not solve the economic and political crisis that has provoked it, and does not make it possible to overcome it once and for all. The bourgeois war arises because the crisis of overproduction, which is characteristic of the development of capitalism and which has become ever more acute and aggravated in the historical period of imperialism, attempts to return the conditions of competition between states and between the monopolistic poles to the previous situation, to a situation in which the capitalist economy expands instead of stagnating and recessing. It is, however, the capitalist system which, given the characteristics of its economy based on private ownership and private appropriation of the social wealth created, and therefore on a system of ever stronger and fiercer competition, while temporarily overcoming the most critical moments of the crisis of overproduction, again generates the factors of an even more serious and greater crisis. This is the history of all capitalist crises to date.

In overcoming the most critical moments of its crises, the capitalist bourgeoisie would not have been successful if it did not have the proletariat at its side, if the wageworkers – precisely because they represent the source of capital valorisation, and hence of profit – did not co-operate, “do their part”, or sacrifice their own lives to the very limit, in total precarity, in unemployment, poverty, dying at work and dying in wars. Thus, while on the one hand, collaboration between the classes is the strength of the bourgeoisie in overcoming its crises, it is also its weakness, which the proletariat can and must affect with its struggle. Without a serious, early and broad struggle against class collaboration, the proletariat will never have a chance to enter on the path of emancipation from capitalism; it will remain forever subjected exclusively to the existential needs of capital, of the market, of capitalist profit, and will again and again allow itself to be massacred only for the benefit of the bourgeoisie.

The Russia-Ukraine war proves once again that this is the crucial aspect that puts the proletariat in the worst position: it allows itself to be massacred without having the strength to react independently, exclusively for the benefit of the capitalists on one or the other of the warring lines.

Against imperialist war, for the resumption of the independent classist struggle of the proletariat!

Against class collaboration, first and foremost with our own national bourgeoisie! Against all nationalism!

For the classist and independent reorganisation of the proletariat above the divisions of race, nation, sex, age, profession!

(1) Cf. Il senso del supporto militare americano all’Ucraina, https://www.geopolitica.info/supporto-militare-americano-ucraina/, 21/01/2022.

(2) Cf. Embargo a chi? Per anni armi “proibite” alla Russia, “il fatto quotidiano”, 17/03/2022.

Il comunista - le prolétaire - el proletario - proletarian - programme communiste - el programa comunista - Communist Program