G7 in Evian. Against imperialism and its wars: back to the methods and principles of class struggle!

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Against imperialism and its wars: back to the methods and principles of class struggle!

The G7, a select group of the world’s most industrialized liberal-democratic nations, established in 1975 to gain the upper hand over the oil-producing powers, is holding its summit this year in Évian. Just as when it was founded, it is taking place today in the same context of a struggle for control over raw materials, with the notable difference that conflicts and power struggles are no longer expressed solely through trade wars, but through systematic military warfare; nor does it concern only oil, but many other raw materials, including “rare earths”, which are just as strategic for the very dominance of the imperialist powers.

Through its various international summits, capitalism seeks to create the illusion that it can control the colossal economic forces it generates and resolve the wars it provokes through negotiated peace. The crises and wars that punctuate its history reveal the opposite. Thus, the 2008 crisis—the event that gave rise to the G20—resulted in a sharp downturn in the global economy. To save their own skins—even though they supposedly didn’t have a penny to spare for the working class—governments had no choice but to inject trillions of dollars into their economies, thereby creating even more intense conditions of competition that fuel political, economic, and above all military explosions, potentially even more severe than before. In these moments of panic, talk of liberalism vanishes just as quickly as stock market indices plummet. Let us make no mistake: there is no such thing as neo- or hyper-liberalism, nor post-industrialism or post-capitalism, nor any other intellectual gimmick produced by scholarly academies or Nobel laureates in economics. Whatever label scholars on every continent may slap on it, capitalism—having reached its final stage—reigns tyrannically: imperialism (Lenin).

Bourgeois society, based on the production of commodities, can survive only by creating an ever-increasing quantity of products, which accumulate into an ever-growing mass of capital but then struggle to find buyers. Under this intensified competition, the conditions of trade reach a fever pitch that inexorably drives every company, every nation, to exploit the working class even more ruthlessly in order to extract more surplus value from it.

Capitalism, cloaked in a multitude of interchangeable guises—democratic, theocratic, or autocratic—is a threat to humanity, indeed to all of humanity. Admittedly, it emerged as a progressive force to overthrow the old regimes and feudal privileges that hindered its development, but for a long time now, it has been nothing more than a counterrevolutionary force charged with an absolute mission: that of preserving itself by any means necessary and against the proletariat.

In the name of supposedly reducing “global imbalances” and creating “a space for dialogue among major powers,” it has established all manner of “coordination” bodies, of which the G7 is one of the most prominent. Following Russia’s exclusion (though it remains a member of the G20), it now brings together the small handful of bourgeois “democratic” states in a struggle over the division of the world between the United States, China, and Russia. Whether at the G7, among the newcomers of the BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC), or others, the rhetoric is always the same: to unite interests in order to better regulate the appetites of individual countries or groups of countries. But can wolves, foxes, hyenas, and jackals coexist when the leg of lamb becomes too small?

For French President Macron, the G7 is an institution capable of taking action to restore calm in a world where: “Profound imbalances threaten the stability of the global economy: predatory competition, excess industrial capacity, underinvestment, excessive debt and deregulation, a decline in international solidarity, weak private investment in developing countries, and so on. These imbalances result in significant trade tensions as well as geopolitical tensions. The international economy is no longer a arena for cooperation, nor even one of fierce competition: it has become a space of confrontation where ambitions of power and domination are expressed through the balance of power and coercion. These imbalances have a direct impact on the ability of all countries to grow and develop” (1).

The bourgeoisie can no longer hide from the proletariat the reality of the capitalist crisis that is eroding their standard of living and plunging them into constant economic and social insecurity. But faced with this reality, which is obvious to every proletarian, it draws a thick smokescreen of illusions about building a dialogue among the powerful to mitigate conflicts and wars and return to a “balanced” situation where everyone discusses matters amicably with everyone else, in the interest of all. It touts a return to “international law”—which has been rendered dormant by the dominant imperialist powers themselves, primarily the United States—as the solution to all ills. But it fails to mention that “international law” only comes into existence when history freezes the balance of power between nations and establishes—always through war—a division of the world that remains stable for a certain period. Yet today, the division of the past—that of Yalta—has long been in tatters, and capitalism’s imperialist rivals find themselves on the battlefield, fighting to reconquer, maintain, or expand their share of the market. The war for the division of the world is back, and “international law” will have to wait its turn until the victors are determined.

From this perspective, tensions are concentrated in regions where the interests of different parties clash intensely. They manifest themselves in confrontations where civilian populations are bombed, terrorized, and exterminated, and where the working class serves as cannon fodder to defend the goals of their national bourgeoisies: the Russian-Ukrainian war, wars in the Middle East involving Israel, the United States, Palestine, Lebanon, and Iran, the war in Sudan and the DRC, not to mention the deadly conflicts where antagonistic imperialist forces clash indirectly, through proxy armies or militias.

Today, amid the cacophony of discourse on peace, democratic values, and human rights—intermingled with the arguments of theorists advocating for the convergence of multi-class minority struggles—it is important to reestablish the framework of principles that must guide the proletariat in its historic struggle for emancipation toward a communist society. The proletariat must return to its class struggle and to its organization, independent of the sterilizing forces of opportunism and reformism. The proletariat must regain confidence in its own class strength!

Against the barbaric march toward a new world war aimed at establishing a new imperialist order, there are indeed no possible diplomatic solutions; there is no peaceful alternative.

The only way to radically transform today’s society is through the violent overthrow of capitalism. This will necessarily involve the overthrow of bourgeois states under the blows of the proletarian revolution and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, a transitional phase intended to eliminate the categories of this mercantile mode of production—namely, wage labor, the production of surplus value as its raison d’être, the market, money, usury, etc.— and to subsequently enable the establishment of communism, a human society without wage labor, without classes, without exploitation or oppression, and therefore without war.

It is only under the leadership of the proletariat’s class party that this historic struggle can be waged; history has definitively demonstrated this on numerous occasions. The proletariat is the source of the bourgeoisie’s accumulation of wealth and, consequently, of its power, but it is also the bourgeoisie’s gravedigger.

For the revival of the class struggle and a return to class-based methods and principles!

Let us oppose bourgeois militarism with the strength of proletarian internationalism

Long live internationalism and proletarian solidarity against all imperialists!

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