The Union Pacifiste de France

Dear fellows,     

The Union Pacifiste de France wish you a fructful congress.

Your meetings are very important always, and particularly now in the world situation.

We try and work to stop war without conditions. We are against the russian government and so much against NATO.

We support the pacifists of all sides who refuse to participate to the war.

With our solidarity.

Maurice Montet,

Secretary Union Pacifiste de France

The International Socialist League

LALIT

Comrades, colleagues in the anti-war movement, friends who work for peace,

On the occasion of the 61^st International Antiwar Assemblies, LALIT (meaning “struggle” in the Mauritian language) is pleased to send our revolutionary greetings to Japanese workers and students attending the anti-war assemblies being held in different regions in Japan soon.

At the very outset, we all see the International Antiwar Assemblies taking place at the very moment when the Russian-Ukraine war has surpassed 500 days, causing thousands of deaths, thousands of war injuries, and millions of people displaced, as well as the destruction of much of Ukraine.

While African leaders, to their credit, are looking for a peaceful solution to stop the war, to ensure that poor people in the African Continent are not afflicted by rising prices and food scarcity provoked by the war, the US imperialists are acting for the escalation of the war, i.e. doing exactly the opposite. The UK and USA even managed to sabotage a cease-fire agreed in March last year, even when Ukraine had agreed, arguing that Russia was not weakened enough for the liking of the West. Imagine how different life would be in Ukraine, had that cease-fire led to peace negotiations? President Biden has now unilaterally decided to send cluster munitions to Ukraine, adding even more danger of severe humanitarian consequences and unacceptable harm to civilians (Convention on Clusters Munitions, 2008). In retaliation, Putin is threatening to use same kind of bombs. More than 100 countries, even a majority of countries in the NATO alliance, are against the use of these unconventional arms.

LALIT demands that the war be stopped. There needs to be an immediate ceasefire, and negotiations opened. The Russian army must immediately withdraw its troops from Ukraine. The NATO countries, led by US imperialists who totally control Europe now, must immediately stop sending arms to Ukraine. This new form of proxy war, where the USA arms Ukrainians, will only lead to further escalation, and death and destruction. NATO must be disbanded, as the Warsaw Pact was. It is as simple as that. The USA’s undertaking not to expand NATO eastwards has, unfortunately, just been flaunted, time and time again, until encirclement of Russia is now well-nigh complete. And now NATO starts to encircle China, openly aiming to set up desks in Japan and South Korea. The USA is putting inordinate pressure, as you know, on these two Eastern countries, to spend on arms, i.e. like Europe, in reality on American arms.

In Mauritius, we in LALIT are, for our part, continuing to mobilize to close down the UK-USA military base on Mauritian territory, i.e. Diego Garcia which is part of the Chagos Archipelago region of the Republic of Mauritius. Our struggle moved forward, as you know, after the UN General Assembly 2019 resolution told the UK to withdraw altogether from the entire Chagos Archipelago. This came after the International Court of Justice judgment declared the UK-US military occupation to be the illegal occupation of a sovereign country. The UK and USA, while arming Ukraine to the teeth to oppose illegal occupation by Russia, just, themselves, illegally occupy our country. They do not even see their own hypocrisy.

Our Government is now, shamefully, holding secret talks with the UK Government, and making concessions. The Mauritian Prime Minister has even gone so far, after winning at the ICJ and UN General Assembly (where the UK-USA alliance was so isolated it got support from only three countries, Israel, Australia and Hungary) as to offer the USA a lease on Diego Garcia for their base to continue operating. We oppose this. LALIT, three big union federations, workers’ and women’s associations and anti-base militants, have come together to oppose these talks and this offer of a lease.

Our struggle on Chagos continues, focusing as always on (a) the dismantling of the US military base on Diego Garcia and the cleaning up of any nuclear and other pollution (b) the right of Chagossians as well as all people of Mauritius in general to visit or settle on all the Chagos islands, i.e. freedom of movement within our country (c) and the complete decolonization and re-unification of Mauritius territory, as called for by the UN’s courts and General Assembly. Military occupation must end.

LALIT’s struggle against wars and military bases in the Indian Ocean and world-wide has over years linked us together with the struggle that the JRCL is waging in opposing the Japanese ruling class and US imperialists maintaining military bases in Japan, and opposing arms manufacture and arms build-up. We oppose all the 800 or so military bases all over the world. They must all be dismantled, just as NATO  must be.

Our struggles against wars and militarism are linked to our struggles against the capitalist system. Democracy in the capitalist system is difficult, if not impossible, when countries like the USA are run by a small band of a few hundred capitalists that run the monopoly firms of the “Military Industrial Complex”, of the Big Pharma, of the the food and agriculture sector, and of Big Data. It is these types of firm that dominate, and exploit the broad masses of the whole world, taking all the decisions in the interests of their profits. They, in turn, put humanity in a triple, inter-related existential threat: destruction through nuclear war, destruction through pollution-related environmental collapse, destruction through the collapse of civilization into either bands of armed men, of which Haiti is a precursor country, or into a dystopia of extreme state repression, of which we will soon have examples, if we do not manage to oppose this system in creative ways, relying on the brilliance of ordinary people, when they think and act together independently of the ruling class.

Our common struggle can only be reinforced through articulating our local struggles to the  international struggles and at the same time building networks of organisations working towards revolutionary changes for more equal societies, in particular for classless society. Any lasting revolutionary change needs to be part of an international dynamic for change.

We wish your assemblies to be resourceful and inspiring for workers and students in Japan in the fight against the imperialist war, and against the military bases and the arms industry, that together, cause war.

Rada Kistnasamy



All Pakistan Federation of United Trade Unions (APFUTU)

I am grateful to you for inviting us. All Pakistan Federation of United Trade Unions (APFUTU) appreciates your struggle and stands with you to promote peace efforts. We also fully support the demands that you are going to approve in the 2023 program. The world will become a cradle of peace only with the joint efforts of all of us.

The All Pakistan Federation of United Trade Unions (APFUTU) also held massive protests across the country on May 28, 1998 over the nuclear test by the government of Pakistan and demanded that the government of Pakistan, instead of becoming a nuclear power, rid the country of poverty, unemployment and Practical work should be done on the elimination of social injustice. Undoubtedly, during the peace efforts, the leadership of All Pakistan Federation of United Trade Unions (APFUTU) faced serious cases and the assets of the federation were also seized and sold, but even today we are trying to promote peace efforts and We salute every struggle for peace, love and brotherhood in the world. No doubt you are also striving day and night for a great cause. We salute your courage and bravery.

Regards

Mr. Zia Syed
Secretary General
All Pakistan Federation of United Trade Unions (APFUTU)

Lotta Comunista

Lotta Comunista: to the 61° International Anti-War Assembly, Japan:

Internationalists greetings to the 61st International Anti-War Assembly!

For more than a year the imperialist war in Ukraine has been massacring the Ukrainian workers and their Russian working brothers sent to both fronts in a senseless and reactionary slaughter. All our internationalist solidarity must go to the Ukrainian workers and the Russian workers. In Russia and Ukraine workers are forced to conscript and are driven by the nationalist ideologies of big Russian chauvinism and small Ukrainian defensivism to shoot each other, and they are arrested if they refuse to fight or even if they call this "war" by its name. Here in Europe, these things are well known. The Ukrainian military arrests the deserters and so do the Russian invasion forces. And then there are the so-called “incidents,” when both Russian and Ukrainian soldiers hit their officers. These are well known things. By now, thousands of Russian and Ukrainian workers who have fled, with their families and children, find refuge in our cities. They are welcome! We know, comrades, all the wars of our age are against the workers. No war is justified from the point of view of our international working class, except the war of the exploited classes against the exploiters.

For months, Russian workers and Ukrainian workers have been consuming themselves for a few kilometers of land and their lives have become a bargaining chip between the great powers. It is certainly not the Ukrainian oligarchs who defend the "fatherland": they sit comfortably in Kiev counting the money arriving from the Western allies, while "their" workers die at the front, armed by the powers to defend the democracy of the imperialists, and incited by the Ukrainian state to defend the right to return tomorrow to be exploited by "their" Ukrainian slavers, and by European ones, and not already by Russian slavers. But what a system is this that slaughters workers in the name of national defense only to decide which of the slaveholders - the big Russian imperialist slaveholder or the petty powers-backed Ukrainian slaveholder - will exploit them tomorrow!

Communists consider any war an act of barbarism, but they recognize the legitimacy of civil wars of the oppressed against their oppressors, to arrive at a classless society liberated from war. Even the Italian Resistance during the Second World War, a well-known experience in Japan, must be an example.

First of all, there was not only the Italian Resistance, but there was a resistance movement in all European countries. The workers' Resistance against Nazism in Germany, for example, must be known. In Italy, the founders of Lotta Comunista - then young workers without the Leninist party - participated in the Resistance against the Italian fascist state and against the Nazi military forces. There was no other choice, faced with the raids in the factories, than to give oneself over to illegality. Without proletarian revolution, and given the counter-revolutionary role of Stalinism in the Resistance, that experience of that workers' struggle was overshadowed by the international imperialist war. The Resistance - Arrigo Cervetto would write - was "prisoner of Yalta" and it did not go beyond the division of old Europe between the victorious imperialisms, American, English and Russian. The young generation of worker partisans who would found Lotta Comunista after the war emerged from that experience with a clear warning, passed on to subsequent generations in the party heritage: "never again an instrument in the hands of others"! Japanese comrades, this was the main lesson of the Resistance!

The problem of the military struggle against the occupier was certainly not posed in narrow terms. Cervetto will write it, in controversy with Bordiga: «/Taken in isolation, i.e. "abstractly", the Italian situation, only a doctrinaire out of touch with reality can answer that the workers should not have allied themselves with all those forces fighting against Nazi-fascism. In the struggle there are reasons of life and death that determine alliances. But perhaps the policy of "national unity" ... was not the result of the alliance between the United States, England and the USSR? And then, given this policy as a means, what was the purpose? Was it perhaps, as the revolutionary tactic would have advised, to arm, strengthen, develop the proletarian movement in the struggle in order to then throw overboard those old social forces with a violent jolt that ushered in a new order? The facts have shown the opposite, they have shown that the "means" only served the "purpose" of conserving, preserving and restoring the capitalist structure and state, to bring the old ruling class afloat/". Here is a lesson from the famous Italian Resistance. Today among uncritical supporters of the so-called Ukrainian resistance not a word is said about this important lesson. And that doesn't make us think?

Comrades, let us fearlessly denounce Russian imperialist aggression together! And let us together denounce the defense of the reactionary Ukrainian homeland, the national unity seized by the powers against the workers. The workers have no country! The workers must not defend the borders of nations, but only their own class. All our solidarity goes to the Ukrainian workers attacked by the Russian, European and American imperialists and by Ukrainian nationalism. In proxy wars between powers, the proletarians are the assaulted and world imperialism is the real aggressor. Anyone who doesn't understand this is a reactionary who still defends "the territories" as in the Middle Ages. Our “purpose”, on the other hand, is revolution and certainly not resistance. But we know this well, both in Europe and in Asia.

In fact, while in Europe the Ukrainian national question is seized by the powers, also in Asia the imperialist marauders are preparing to seize the Taiwan question. The next few years will be decisive for the Japanese and European revolutionaries. There are those who will see China as a country attacked by the imperialist powers, American and Japanese, with the “right” to defend itself; and there are those who will think that the people of Taiwan have the “right” to self-determination after all. Both sophisms will be easily grasped by powers old and new. Comrades, it is our task to guide the workers on these thorny issues and to bring about the necessary clarity. The workers have no country!

We appeal to the Japanese proletariat: it is time to oppose the rearmament of Japanese imperialism and its aggressive warfare in Asia, against Japanese nationalism, against Japanese "defence of the fatherland"; for the unity of the Japanese, Chinese and Taiwanese proletarians against their own governments. Down with the unity of the Japanese people with the Japan Self-Defense Forces and long live the struggle of the Japanese proletariat against its national bourgeoisie! Comrades, in the war of aggression of Japanese imperialism in Asia, every Japanese communist will wish for the defeat of his country in order to overthrow its bourgeois regime.

Asian raiders rearm to the teeth. Chinese imperialism launches its aircraft carriers and patrols the Straits while projecting its influence and its capital towards the Persian Gulf, along the new Silk Roads. The old Japanese imperialism and the young Indian power rethink the importance of oil supplies in the outbreak of the Second World War in Asia. South Korea is also mirrored in the Japanese political debate and thinks of nuclear weapons. If the bourgeois are thinking of war, the proletarians must think of revolution and certainly not stop himself at resistance. We have a vast world to conquer and only our shackles to lose. Let's break the hesitations!

Where there is a working class, inevitably there is class struggle. The strike is a "natural" phenomenon of capitalism. This is demonstrated by the strikes in the old powers, often less extensive, intensive and generalized defensive strikes than in recent decades, but also unequivocal signs that class energies exist and must be organised. This is demonstrated by the vindicatory strikes in the new powers, which no government and no more or less perfect form of imperialist democracy can prevent, not even China. Japanese comrades, you have first-hand information on the situation of class struggles in China. There is an extensive Leninist literature on strike statistics. In China, as in France, Great Britain and Japan, the vanguard party must analyze and quantify the strikes and accustom the working class to measure their energies with scientific realism.

The working class now deeply embraces all continents and crosses all borders. Salaried workers are the majority of the world's active population. The word "people" is losing more and more meaning every day in the vocabulary of revolutionary Marxists. In the era of the reactionary bourgeoisie, in the imperialist phase, "the workers have no country"! Comrades, let's shred the old national issues, now more useful for the imperialists to divide us than for us to fight them! Let us answer together the questions of our century: Where is it written that the internationalists of the third millennium still have to defend the "rights" of nations? It's senseless. Every year 40, perhaps 50 million peasants leave the countryside to become urban proletarians and, among these, 4 or 5 million cross national borders becoming political and economic refugees, immigrants in other countries, low-wage workers. The imperialist bourgeoisies of America, Europe and Japan, and increasingly also of China, compete in two ways for these new energies thrown into the labor market by the extensive development of capitalism: 1) by importing cheap immigrant labor into the metropolises, and 2) by exporting capital to developing and emerging countries. Both of these well-tried systems presuppose an enlargement of the basis of capitalist exploitation.

China has already started exporting capital to emerging markets, but it can still exploit a quota of internal migrants due to the continental dimension of its state, yet it is still not long before the demographic winter typical of imperialist societies, and perhaps aggravated by the one-child policy, will finally force Beijing too to import a young workforce from Asia and Africa, as is already the case in its southern regions. In China, there are large concentrations of private and state capital, financial concentrations of banking and industrial capital that export significant amounts of capital to divide the world market once dominated by the old powers. China is a new imperialist power contending for the world by economic, political and military means. It is this imperialist upheaval that has thrown the world order into crisis and called together, on 15 and 16 July, the meeting of the internationalist forces in Milan in which you too, JRCL-RMF, participated in written form. The Milan International Bulletin will soon be sent to all Japanese comrades.

Immigration has become a social hallmark of imperialism. The industrial and welfare systems of the old powers need immigrants to stay afloat, but the imperialist governments must subject the newcomers to the new slavery for starvation wages and, at the same time, they must reassure their elderly voters, made greedy by property and impoverished by the opulent social mores of the metropolis, with campaigns of "law and order", racism and religious prejudices. The civilized countries of Europe decree hundreds of thousands of entries every year, counting on at least as many entries through illegal routes, and in the meantime they pay their African bourgeois cronies to "control" the migratory flows with batons, dogs and barbed wires, letting women and children drown in the Mediterranean or pushing them back into the desert to die of thirst. And so also Japan, one of the most closed imperialisms in the world, has to import workforce from Vietnam and Asia. The parliamentary parties of the right and left "want immigrants" to care for the elderly, clean the cities and pick tomatoes, but "they don't want immigration" to rest assured and continue to dream undisturbed of a world of holidays and individual rights. The old powers want to select immigrants. Here is the imperialist policy of the European Union against our immigrant brothers.

Comrade Japanese internationalists, let us unite in the fight against all racisms and against all national prejudices. The workers have no country!

Long live proletarian internationalism! Down with narrow-minded and petty nationalism!

Или мы победим войну, или война победит нас

Уважаемые участники антивоенной ассамблеи!

Наша планета стоит на переломе, которого никогда не было в мировой истории и который особенно трудно понять после 78 лет развития без мировых войн: мы находимся на пороге глобального уничтожения 7,5 миллиардов человек - включая всех нас, борцов за мир.

Капиталистическая анархия привела мир не только к небывалому классовому расколу, когда 1% богатейших капиталистов богаче половины населения мира, но и к тому, что анархический рост населения стал угрозой экологического самоуничтожения человечества. Если весь мир выйдет на уровень потребления наиболее богатых стран (а только несколько миллионов человек во всём мире достигли уровня нормального материального обеспечения), то для этого не хватит большинства ресурсов, а экологическая угроза от вредных отходов усугубит положение. Уже сейчас не только учёные, но и многие страны почувствовали на себе главную угрозу – перегрев атмосферы и океана, небывалый в истории человечества.

В этих условиях только переход на однодетную семью в мировом масштабе (вместе с развитием прогрессивных технологий) смогут предотвратить губительные экологические последствия капиталистической анархии. Однако такая социальная политика сейчас недоступна большинству беднейших стран мира, которые на протяжении веков эксплуатируются капиталистами развитых стран (в том числе Японии), ибо она требует значительных средств на создание системы социального обеспечения для тех стран, где лишь собственные дети могут обеспечить неработоспособных родителей.

Но поскольку за последние полвека такая политика в мировом масштабе не проводится (лишь КНР удалось сознательно стабилизировать численность населения, и в ряде развитых стран произошёл стихийный переход к однодетной семье), но в тоже время увеличиваются и совершенствуются арсеналы оружия массового поражения (не столько ядерного, сколько биологического и химического), то логически мы приходим к выводу, что мировой финансовый олигархат (преимущественно США) взял курс на решение проблемы перенаселения насильственным, военным путём.

Кроме того, империалисты США рассчитывают в Третьей мировой войне уничтожить не только бедняков всего мира, которые не нужны им ни как покупатели товаров, но и как продавцы рабочей силы, но и основных своих конкурентов: КНР, ЕС, Японию (Россия с 1-2% мирового ВВП преимущественно в сырьевых отраслях – не конкурент США). А поскольку известна вековая практика американского империализма – достигать своих целей чужими руками, то стратегия США вполне ясна – стравить в Европе Россию с ЕС, а в Азии – КНР с Японией («чемберлены» и «даладье», не понимающие хода мирового развития, среди руководителей многих стран не перевелись). Победители в этой борьбе будут добиты США – «союзникам» не следует тешить себя надеждами.

В этих условиях борьба за мир является единственным способом предотвратить развязывание полномасштабной войны. Для рабочего и коммунистического движения в этих условиях главным является борьба против собственного империализма (в том числе такого, который не понимает той роли, которую ему отвели вашингтонские кукловоды) – и это очень трудная борьба, ибо кучка капиталистов руками нанятых слуг, особенно в СМИ, научилась ловко манипулировать психологией масс. Когда коммунисты клеймят империалистов и агрессоров других стран, и не замечают реакционной деятельности «своих», то они невольно (или вольно) выступают защитниками «собственных» капиталистов.

Опыт Первой и Второй мировых войн показал, что рабочий класс империалистических стран не смог противодействовать военным планам империалистов, в первую очередь потому, что был подкуплен «своими» капиталистами за счёт грабежа колоний и других стран. Известно, что жизненный уровень рабочего класса в Германии за счёт грабежа оккупированных стран возрастал до 1943 года, и не немецкий капиталист, а немецкий рабочий воевал не только в таким же прикормленным рабочим Англии и Франции, но и с пролетариатом социалистической России.

Кроме того, сейчас, несмотря на то что для современного империализма вопросы территориального владения давно ушли в прошлое, массам внедряются иллюзии о необходимости различных территориальных претензий. Великобритания на другом конце мира ввязалась в войну за Фолклендские (Мальвинские) острова, веками никем не заселённые (которые сейчас известны лишь скромным овцеводством), угрожая применением ядерного оружия Аргентине. Япония, Китай и Вьетнам спорят о кучке мелких островов в Южно-Китайском море. Японских трудящихся десятки лет возбуждают насчёт островов Малой Курильской гряды, на которых исторически жили не японцы, а айны; такая же националистическая кампания насчёт этих островов ведётся в России. Неужели все проблемы Японии и её пролетариата будут решены при присоединении этих клочков земли, а пролетариат России станет жить ещё хуже без этих территорий?

С другой стороны, не следует забывать, что существуют действительно не решённые национальные проблемы, связанные с территориями. Насильственно отделённый от Китая Тайвань, населённый китайцами – одна из таких проблем. КНР уже удалось отобрать у колонизаторов Макао и Гонконг; возврат Тайваня – следующий необходимый шаг в национальной консолидации китайской нации. Развал Советского Союза, в котором национальные вопросы решались относительно успешно (но не без сталинистских ошибок), породил ряд территориальных споров между националистическими буржуазными государствами, возникшими на руинах СССР. Вооружённые конфликты между Арменией и Азербайджаном, Молдовой и Приднепровской республикой, Грузии с Абхазией и Южной Осетией – следствия разгула местных национализмов, пытавшихся подавить другие нации.

Особое место среди этих конфликтов заняли конфликты между Россией и Украиной. Границы современной Украины были установлены, в основном, немецким генералом Гофманом во время оккупации в 1918 году и включали ряд районов, в которых проживало неукраинское население: русские, евреи, молдаване, белорусы, поляки и пр. В советское время ряд национально-территориальных вопросов был урегулирован, например, район Гомеля был передан в Белоруссию, в северная часть Черниговщины – в Россию. Однако ряд других вопросов так и остался неурегулированным, в том числе и потому, что в СССР проводилась политика исключения как великодержавного шовинизма, так и местного национализма, и в Украинской ССР все национальности развивались свободно (хотя и не без мелких проблем).

Августовская контрреволюция изменила положение в Украине, где стал набирать силу украинский национализм. В стране, в которой всё население знало русский язык, а каждый пятый был русскоговорящим, русский язык потерял статус государственного и стал насильственно вытесняться, что нарушало гражданские права населения, особенно в Донбассе и в Крыму. Эта политика украинских националистов велась по прямому указанию американских спецслужб и вызвало законное сопротивление населения на Юго-Востоке Украины и в Крыму. Государственный переворот в Киеве, организованный спецслужбами НАТО, и приход к власти откровенных националистов побудило рабочий класс Донбасса к сопротивлению и борьбе за независимость. Возникли две республики: Донецкая и Луганская, против которых киевские власти начали вооружённую борьбу. К сожалению, слабо организованный пролетариат Донбасса не получил поддержку мирового пролетариата и был оттеснён от власти в этих народных республиках ставленниками российских властей. Киевская военщина все эти годы вела обстрелы этих регионов, от которых погибли несколько тысяч человек гражданского населения, включая женщин и детей. Эти военные преступления поддерживались империалистами НАТО, а мировой пролетариат не оказал сопротивления империалистам.

Этот конфликт, который вполне можно было решить мирным путём, разжигался странами НАТО, особенно ближайшими союзниками США в блоке. Расширение военных действий с обеих сторон давно потеряло все разумные основания; с обеих сторон в конфликте за интересы империалистов США за полтора года погибло в десятки раз больше людей, чем от варварских обстрелов донбасских республик.

Этот конфликт грозит перерасти в мировую войну на уничтожение, и главный виновник и организатор этой войны – финансовый олигархат США.

Развернём мировую борьбу против мировой войны!

The Collective for the Refoundation of the Fourth International - FLTI

7/28/2023
To the 61st International Antiwar Assembly

Comrades of the JRCL-RMF,
Comrades Zengakuren,
Comrades of the Antiwar Youth Committee,

From the Collective for the Refoundation of the Fourth International - FLTI, we want to send an internationalist revolutionary salute.

Comrades,
Your assembly is taking place when almost a year and a half has passed since the counterrevolutionary invasion of Ukraine by Putin and the "Great Russia" started, aimed to subdue and subjugate it. This Moscow offensive has cost dozens of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees and a divided and occupied nation.

We have witnessed the rebellion of Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner brigade, a Putin's Praetorian Guard, made up of fascist mercenaries, who also wage war in the service of the highest bidder. This opened a crisis on the military front and in Moscow.
Prigozhin reached as far as arriving 200 km from the Russian capital, enjoying the “neutrality” of large sections of the army and its officer caste. His raid ended in a great negotiation, as it could not be otherwise between partners.
Prigozhin took shelter in Belarus and continues to sell his services, which are no other than selling weapons for the Moscow military apparatus and offering himself as a guardian of the imperialist transnationals installed in the semi-colonial world. This is what Wagner does; in Libya they look after the imperialist companies with Heftar (a CIA agent); or in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso among others, they sell his troops as mercenaries to take care of the business of all the imperialist companies that loot uranium for their nuclear power, particularly France. They are sales representatives for Moscow's arms sales, which also supply Angola, Algeria, Egypt, Sudan...
And Stalinism and his henchmen want to make Putin and his mercenaries pass off as "anti-imperialist".

Comrades,
The Russian offensive is bogged down in the Ukraine. It has turned into trench warfare, where the new borders of the occupied and split Ukraine are being fixed with blood.
200 thousand Russian soldiers have already died. This explains why the recruiting centers of the Russian army are set on fire on a daily basis. The discontent of the troops both in the front and in the rear is already evident. The workers do not want to die for Putin's business and his gang of oligarchs. The officers of the armed forces threaten to divide among themselves. A political crisis is brewing.

While this is happening, at the last NATO/G7 summit, after being dragged around and patted on the back, Zelensky was returned to Ukraine empty-handed. This was the moment of greatest crisis for Moscow in this war, however the US imperialists pushed Ukraine into a farcical “counteroffensive”, with war supplies, tanks and artillery from the Second World War and the 1970s, without aviation and without long-range missiles.
The US seeks a military balance that strategically allows it to achieve its political objective, which is to subdue Ukraine as a colony after being partitioned by Putin and simultaneously weaken Moscow, while avoiding the fall and implosion of the Russian regime at the hands of the masses, which would mean a Vietnam against the counterrevolutionary device of imperialism in Great Russia and in all the former Soviet republics.
With this trench warfare, what the US is looking for is the emergence of a "Yeltsinist" caste of officers and Moscow oligarchs, that is, that they become partners and direct agents of Wall Street, as was Yeltsin, the head of the capitalist restoration in the former USSR in the '90s. This Russian ex-president was a direct man of Reagan, Thatcher and the Citibank, with whom he organized the fundamental businesses after the fall of the USSR.
Also, with the war in Ukraine, the US sought to assert its victorious role in World War II. A reluctant Maastricht was submitted to NATO. It destroyed the Nordstream 2 gas pipeline and all the living space in Europe that the Franco-German axis had built for itself in recent decades from Portugal to Russia. The US imperialists put themselves now in the front row for keeping the benefits of the minerals, gas, hydrocarbons and commodities of “Great Russia”. Also, they are already preparing 720 companies that will take over the million-dollar businesses of the reconstruction of Ukraine.

Comrades,
We cannot allow this outcome. It is the Ukrainian working class that fights and dies at the front. It is in their hands to lead the struggle for national liberation. It is the Russian working youth who leave their blood in the human butchery in the trenches on behalf of the counterrevolutionary oligarchs of Moscow.
What is clear is that under the command of Zelensky and the lackeys of imperialism in Kyiv, the invader cannot be defeated.
The path is none other than to set up a proletarian leadership of the war in Ukraine, which disavow the IMF and the looting of its nation, which expropriate the transnationals and the large landholdings and companies of the Ukrainian bourgeoisie and put all the economy at the service of winning the war against Putin's tyranny. This would quickly unify the Ukrainian working class from Kyiv to Donbass. That would be a deadly blow to Putin’s rearguard.
The path for Ukraine to win this war also lies in the uprising of the Russian masses. They have in their hands the possibility of paralyzing and defeating the Moscow fascist war machine from within, which would open a revolutionary uprising inside Russia.
The upheaval of the European working class in solidarity with the subjugated Ukrainian nation, invaded by Putin, is a decisive factor. The workers of the old world have in their hands the task to defeat the imperialist Maastricht and NATO. They and their governments are unloading their crisis on the working class and are coming for all the workers gains.

Comrades,
The world capitalist-imperialist system is in an agonizing crisis, which since its outbreak in 2008 has not found a way out other than the attack on the world working class, and wars. In successive crises, the global division of labor has been broken.
The imperialist powers come out to dispute the world. Germany, for now, has submitted to the Anglo-American axis, while France, which cries out "not wanting to be a pawn of the US", finds itself hard hit by its isolation; and its colonies, such as in sub-Saharan Africa (Mali, Chad, Niger, Senegal, etc.) are undergoing a huge crisis. For Paris, these colonies mean obtaining uranium at a vile price, which feeds the entire electrical system and its nuclear power.  Hit by the persistent struggle of her working class and the crises in her colonies, France has become one of the weakest links in the chain of imperialist rule.
The nations of sub-Saharan Africa have been filled with military bases from all the imperialist countries. In Niger, France has 1500 men and military bases. USA has a military base with more than 1000 men and military gear. The US imperialists have entered into an open dispute over them. With the ongoing coups, the national bourgeoisies seek to anticipate to the revolutionary uprising of the masses, as that of Kenya, and from there renegotiate their dividends as junior partners of the transnational companies.

There are too many imperialist powers. The struggle for the sources of raw materials and minerals that are essential for the new high-tech industries threatens new wars and massacres. To the dispute and the offensive for lithium, coltan, cobalt, uranium, gas, etc., there are Anglo-Canadian, USA, Japanese, German, French companies...
China looks for these minerals in the most difficult areas to extract in different regions of Africa, building the ports, the routes, making agreements with its currency. The Chinese bourgeoisie has become a great international trader bourgeoisie (like the English one in the 19th century), which not only exports (each time less), but also purchases raw materials for its powerful internal market to work. But, unlike the great imperialist powers, it cannot set up military bases to guard its trade.
These disputes over the sources of raw materials are opening up enormous instability in the world economy, in addition to the increase in the prices of food. New political crises, coups d'état and also enormous class combats are underway in Africa and Latin America essentially, where the great sources and reserves of these minerals are located. Let's not forget that because of coltan, imperialism divided the Congo and provoked fratricidal wars that cost a genocide of 4 million Congolese.
In past years and decades, we have seen the "oil wars" that filled the entire Middle East with blood and genocide, but also huge and gigantic worker and peasant revolutions that shook the entire world, not only in Palestine but throughout the region, as we have seen from 2011.
This is the ongoing process in the semicolonial world. It is a matter of life or death for rhe working class of the imperialist centres to stop the imperialist beast from within. This is so because in the face of the bankruptcy of their governments and regimes, they are coming for all the workers gains.

Comrades,
The world market has shrunk. There are already more than 700 million hungry people on the planet, according to the UN. The Mediterranean and the US border have been transformed into a tomb for migrant workers seeking a new opportunity to survive.
The Anglo-American imperialism, allied to Japan, and for now followed by Germany, not only goes for the sources of raw materials, but also needs that powerful Chinese domestic market, to which it has penetrated with its banks and its companies.
The American imperialists come for everything to keep their hegemony. In the midst of the war in Ukraine, they have taken 75% of the world arms market, taking a large part of the client portfolio from Moscow.
Anglo-American imperialism, allied to Japan, have built a true “NATO” in the Pacific. They have placed military bases all across that region, as in Chile and mainly Peru.

Capitalists have spent and parasitized benefits that human labor has not yet produced. The global financial oligarchy has covered its bankruptcies and deficits by emptying state treasuries, and seeks to make the world working class pay for its crisis. All the debts of nations, banks and companies have grown to the brutal figure of 188 trillion dollars, which is equivalent to 230% of world GDP.

Comrades,
The international working class wages battle. It has demonstrated it in Iraq and in Sri Lanka by seizing the citadel of power. Also in the great combats of the US working class yesterday, with the Black movement at its head.
Latin America, strangled by the IMF, is the ground for the uprising of workers and peasants, while the working class in Africa is fighting hard, as we saw in South Africa with the general strikes that defeated governments like Zuma's, or the Kenyan uprising against tax increases.
In Europe, the Maastricht working class refuse to be the ones to pay for the crisis. Their advance detachment is in France.
The working class of the former Soviet republics, as we saw in Kazakhstan, Belarus, Georgia, with the crisis that threatens Moscow in the face of a military defeat in the Ukraine and the uprising that began in their youth, are signs that after 1989, the former Soviet proletariat seeks to get rid of the hated regimes and governments of the capitalist restoration and integrate, as it has been doing with the hard fights of the resistance in China, to the torrent of class struggle worldwide.
In Latin America, Peru is the outpost today of the revolutionary struggle of the masses there, as yesterday Chile, Colombia, Ecuador were, battles betrayed a thousand times by Stalinism and reformism.

Comrades,
The true crisis of the working class, is the lack of an internationalist revolutionary leadership, to coordinate and centralize its fight for the revolution in all regions and zones of the planet, as imperialism and the bourgeoisie do, with its states, armies, gunboats and transnationals, and the treacherous leaderships of the masses that the former buy for them to betray the struggle of the masses.
Stalinism, after 1989, after handing over the former workers states, has been rescued by the bourgeoisie to play again in this century all its counterrevolutionary role.
The parties that called themselves socialist and revolutionary, like those that have reneged and destroyed our Fourth International, are acting today as an appendage to Stalinism and have completely dissolved our world party. They retake from Stalinism their policy of supporting the fronts of class collaboration. They call to vote for bourgeois politicians that they brand as "progressives", who are actually executioners of the people. They proclaim themselves "anti-capitalist", but as we can see in France, along with Stalinism, they have built a true wall so that the masses do not finish defeating the Macron government and the Fifth Republic.
The great betrayal of reformism in the 21st century, in the midst of the crisis and bankruptcy of the world capitalist system, is their poisoning the working class, its conscience and its struggles by proposing that the struggle for socialism and the revolution is not an immediate task, and that the working class and the exploited masses can improve their standard of living and existence within this bankrupt system and its terminal crisis. This is a lie and an infamy.
All of them have sullied and given out Socialism and committed the worst crimes in its name.
Despite them, the alternative Socialism or Barbarism is more valid than ever.

In each struggle, thousands of vanguard workers become radicalized and begin a process of breaking with the treacherous leaderships. They surpass their leaderships. Those are the forces to set up a powerful internationalist revolutionary movement.
But these processes of radicalization, if they do not find a revolutionary pole that helps them distinguish who their allies are, who their enemies are and where their struggle should go, break up and dissolve due to the perfidious actions of the treacherous leaderships, and this we cannot allow to happen.

We must deepen the struggle we wage in common! The class struggle makes it imperative.
From the FLTI, you know that we are fighting to re-found the Fourth International, without renegades to Marxism or appendages of Stalinism. That is our contribution to the setting up, in this 21st century, of a new Kienthal and Zimmerwald that internationally regroup the ranks of revolutionary Marxism, as it happened yesterday with the revolutionary left wing of the Second International in 1914 at the beginning of World War I. There is no time to lose.

Comrades,
To end this message, we make you an emergency call. In these days, a thousand marines and detachments of the Japanese imperialist army have landed in Peru. A Pacific base has been installed there, imposed by the Dina dictatorship and the Fujimorites in that country. We call on you to intervene jointly in this very hard struggle that has begun, which the masses cannot lose, at the risk that a new black night will once again fill the whole Latin America with blood.
We call on you to join forces to deepen the struggle for the release of political prisoners in Peru today and in the world. Today in Peru a decisive battle of the working class against imperialism is being waged. This Pacific country, without a doubt, is a link in the imperialist control of the entire region, but also, today it is an outpost of the Latin American revolution and of all the workers of the Pacific.
The struggle to expel the US and Japanese imperialist military bases and troops in Peru is the same one as to expel the US imperialist bases from Japan and defeat their militarist regime.

Comrades,
The masses enter the combat for their unprecedented sufferings, fighting for decent work, against the high cost of living, facing the most ferocious of state repressions, defending their conquests, fighting for land and against imperialist looting.
As the entire historical experience has shown, and it becomes decisive at this moment: if the working class does not take power, their struggles are led to a dead end. It is the task of the revolutionaries to put the fight for the revolution as the first item on the agenda of the world working class. It is reformism and traitors who have removed it from the masses agenda.
And if this is not achieved, the road will be open to serious defeats and war. The working class does not have the leadership it deserves.
It is high time to rally the ranks of revolutionary socialists so that the socialist revolution returns as a living social force and sheds light in this dark world of the 21st century. The masses need it.

Let’s fight together
James Sakala for the Workers International League (WIL) - Zimbabwe
Giovani Alberotanza for Avanzata Proletaria (Proletarian Advance) - Italy
Milenka Lopez, Abu Muad, Claudia P., Alejandro Flores and Carlos Munzer
For the Collective for the re-foundation of the Fourth International - FLTI

The Tavini Huiraatira

Dear comrades and friends, Ia ora na !

First of all, warmest greetings from Maohi Nui to Japanese People and to our friends from Zengakuren.

We express great solidarity on the occasion of the 61^st International Antiwar Assemblies in Japan. Our solidarity with the Japanese people is guided by our common goal to reach a nuclear free and peaceful World.

As we all know, the Pacific Ocean has been where nuclear bombs have been fully developed, tested, like in the Marshall Islands and in Maohi Nui, and unfortunately has been used to kill people in Japan. With all the tensions in the world, humanity might soon face a nuclear world war.

A peaceful world could only be reached if imperialist countries stop colonialism or neocolonialism. It seems that these countries have not learn from their past history or other nation history. Today, it is clear that imperialist countries with their liberal economies have no other purpose than make use of other countries wealth and cheap labor in order to lead the world.

Even small Pacific island countries were and are not spared despite their poor wealth. Today, the small Pacific small countries are forced into the dispute between China and USA while France is trying to play a role in this dispute by getting favors from small island states. During the month of July 2023, The french president has been visiting Pacific states to promise France help. But there is no concession regarding the independence of Kanaky and Maohi-nui. France has full control on the economy of Kanaky and  Maohi-Nui and decides which country is good to collaborate with.

People of Maohi Nui still seeks for their freedom like any other nation under control by another nation. Paths to freedom are war or diplomacy. Only diplomacy applies to Maohi-Nui as promoted by the United Nations Organization. However, France has never accepted to sit at the table to discuss Maohi-Nui independence as proposed several times at the UN committee of 24. France forwarded the reason that the Tavini Huiraatira has not won the election. This year, the Tavini Huiraatira won the election and had the majority in our parliament. Would that change France position ? We doubt it since loosing Maohi-Nui means for France a lost of half of its Economic Exclusive Zone! France grandeur is due to its occupied oversea territories where nuclear tests have been carried out. Maohi-nui people would never heal their wounds from the nuclear tests and France will never recognize the hurt and the pain.

Hegemony is not only achieved through the economic and financial sector but also by occupying other nation lands. Imperialist country which hegemony is under threat would never be at rest and would rather reduce our world into chaos. The Anti War movement is important to remind everyone of the terrifying consequences of a war and of the destructive power nuclear bombs which can annihilate our planet Earth.

With Solidarity !  Faaitoito !

Keitapu Maamaatuaiahutapu, Heinui Le Caill and Guillaune Colombani

Members of the Tavini Huiraatira

Editorial board of Spilne/Commons Journal

We are approaching the 530 days of the Russian full scale invasion of Ukraine. During these days we have learnt that there are very few limits to this reactionary imperialist aggression, and even those still existing can be crossed in the future.

The Kremlin's neglect of life was once again demonstrated by the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam by Russian occupiers, which killed dozens of people and hundreds of animals, which devastated towns and villages. While the long-term environmental and social impact of this crime is still to be seen, it is one of the largest human-caused disasters in Europe in recent decades. For Ukrainian society, it is ecocide and the worst environmental disaster since the catastrophe on the Chornobyl nuclear power plant. And we continue to live under the permanent threat of explosion or radioactive leaks at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant - the biggest one in Europe, occupied by the Russian army since the very beginning of the full-scale invasion.

In July 2023 Russia quit the “grain deal”, which, despite the war, allowed the export of Ukrainian harvest through the Black Sea to different parts of the globe, relieving the food security crisis in those developing countries where the population is struggling with hunger. For several days in July in a row, Russia has been systematically shelling Ukraine harvest storages, destroying crops and obviously preventing them from being delivered to people worldwide. This strategy is accompanied by the hypocritical and cynical Kremlin’s self-presentation as a champion of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggle, as a “true” ally of the Global South.

On the 31st of July 2023 two Russian missiles hit an educational facility and a multi-storied apartment building in Kryvyi Rih, killing at least 6 people, including a child, and wounding at least 73, including 8 children. The previous attack on the city happened on June 12, killing 13 civilians. These are just two tragic episodes in the row of many during the 17 months of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine. We are mentioning them specifically to bring attention to the city in the war zone, which for years has been an epicenter of labor militancy in Ukraine. Having previously reported from Kryvyi Rih about strikes on mines, in hospitals and industrial factories, we have to report about local victims of war now. Where workers were organizing the May Day demonstrations, demanding decent wages and expressing solidarity with labor struggles across the globe, people are mourning deaths caused by Russian imperialist aggression.

Several months ago one of our prominent authors Evheny Osievsky, who was 29 years old, was killed in action. A person of libertarian leftist and anti-war beliefs, he went to the army, being sure that Russian aggression must be repelled and that he must participate in this struggle, as many others do. Our social media feeds are filled with obituaries about deaths of workers and independent labor unionists. These days Spilne/Commons and Ukrainian left broadly are mourning our editor, close friend and comrade, Oleksandr (Sasha) Kravchuk. Several weeks ago, being 37 years old and having no health issues before, he died in his sleep due to cardiac arrest. Avoiding any speculation, we must say that these 17 months were extremely tense and hard for all of us, and Sasha was taking responsibility for too many.

Russian imperialism is ruining our homes, sites, seeds and fruits of important struggles, killing workers and intellectuals, putting others under immense stress not everybody manages to go through, destroying nature and harvest, bringing hunger and devastation far beyond the geographical boundaries of Ukraine. With massive arrests and expulsion of the Russian antiwar and anti-imperialist activists, with years-long prison terms and murders of independent journalists, with assault on women and LGBTIQ+ rights, Putin's regime is becoming a leader in authoritarian and antidemocratic global tendencies. Building an alliance with other right-wing forces and governments around the globe, the Kremlin is becoming the number one challenge for the global progressive movements, yet underscored as such by far too many. With its nuclear threats and blackmailing it once again brings the world to the brink of a final disaster.

In this gloomy time of our history, we are feeling the immense support from anti-imperialist activists from all parts of the world. We use this support, trying to build the pass between the idealization and the demonization of the “Ukrainian side”: knowing and criticizing many of the regressive measures and policies Ukrainian government has been implementing, we also know what the Ukrainian society is fighting against, and we know what we, as part of the anti-imperialist movements, are struggling against. We are asserting the words of the Russian Socialist Movement: “This “brave old world” [Putin is trying to create] would be a wonderful place for dictators, corrupt officials, and the far right. But it would be hell for workers, ethnic minorities, women, LGBT people, small nations, and all liberation movements.”

We are calling the antiwar and anti-imperialist activists to support the struggle against this "brave old world". We are urging you to continue your own contribution to the future without imperialist aggressions, antidemocratic right-wing and authoritarian assaults, nuclear threats, exploitational capitalism. We must have a different future or we will have none.

Editorial board of Spilne/Commons Journal

News and Letters Committees

To comrades of the 61st International Antiwar Assembly:

We at News and Letters Committees have been honored to participate with you in antiwar agitation since our founder Raya Dunayevskaya was able to speak in person with the youth in Zengakuren in 1964. We enthusiastically support your work to create this 61st International Antiwar Assembly. The past 17 months since Russia’s genocidal full-scale invasion of Ukraine have witnessed increasing solidarity from workers, activists and people around the world with Ukrainian resistance to the erasing of their lives and national identity.

At the same time, the voices from fascist elements in country after country—such as from Trump supporters in the U.S.—have gotten louder in enabling Putin’s tactics, even his constantly repeated threats to initiate nuclear war. The self-described Leftists who have joined with fascists in a so-called Red-Brown alliance to denounce Ukraine’s fight for self-determination have been exposed for their reactionary behavior much more publicly than for similar actions against Syrian revolutionaries.

Just as capitalist arms makers worked to maintain their bloated World War II profits by replacing the promise of peace with the permanent war economy, making the atomic bombs dropped on the civilian population of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the opening nuclear threat that still looms over us all, the defense of Ukraine has exaggerated the indispensability and inflated the profits of military suppliers. The same goes for the petroleum companies, for whom Russia’s invasion not only multiplied profits but allowed them to sound patriotic in demanding that global dependence on carbon-based fuels be extended for decades, even as great rivers have been reduced to a trickle and deaths mount amidst the hottest days in 100,000 years.

Ukraine’s fight for freedom has made clearer than ever that capitalists see war as a business opportunity. While they remain in charge, propped up by the best politicians they can buy, issues of war and peace, of life and death, come with a price tag. We have seen too many attempts to topple capitalist power which did not end class society. All the more reason at this time to seek a basis for revolution in the liberatory struggles that Karl Marx hailed, of the ongoing fights of Irish and Poles for self-determination, of uprisings of enslaved Blacks in the U.S. and serfs in Russia, and workers’ control from every workshop to the 1871 Paris Commune. The solidarity in support of Ukrainians, and the solidarity at this conference, represent threads to a world without imperialist war, a world without capitalist war, a world without nuclear war.

For freedom,
Bob McGuire, for
The National Editorial Board of News and Letters Committees, July 31, 2023




* The Executive Committee received another message days after the Assembly. We add it below.

Organizing Committee for the Reconstitution of the Fourth International (OCRFI)

Statement of the OCRFI on the occasion of the anniversary of the Hiroshima Atomic Bombing

The 6^th of August 1945

In a few days, on the 6^th of August, commemorations will take place in remembrance of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, on the 6^th of August 1945.

The destruction of Hiroshima was followed a few days later by the annihilation of Nagasaki. Hundreds of thousands of Japanese people were killed in one stroke.

It is indeed a date to be remembered by the labour movement. In the framework of capitalism, a tremendous technical advance represented by the control of atomic fission was transformed into the most murderous means of destruction. Everybody knows today that the propaganda about ending the Second World War more quickly is nothing but lies. The atomic destructive power was released to threated and frighten the people of the world and to show that all powers would have to accept the leadership of American imperialism.

In 2023, Hiroshima has been in the news since sometime before the anniversary of that act of mass slaughter. In May 2023 the heads of State of the 7 most powerful capitalist industrial powers (USA, Britain, Germany, Japan, France, Italy and Canada) met in Hiroshima. That type of meeting is usually devoted to indicating what should be the main lines of development of the world economy. This time, emphasis was put on the military conflict raging between Ukraine and Russia. The main capitalist powers declared that they would accentuate their support to Ukraine and their more and more direct involvement.

Hiroshima may have seemed a strange choice for such a stand. There was not a word of sorrow or excuse for the 1945 atrocity: it looked like a meeting of culprits returning to the scene of their crime to prepare new ones.

A critical escalation

And indeed, in the following weeks, there was a summit meeting of NATO – the military coalition under the command of American imperialism - held in Vilnius, Lithuania in July 2023.

Jens Stoltenberg, the General Secretary of NATO, enthusiastically claimed that the meeting had approved the most ambitious of defence plans since the end of the Cold War, adopting measures to get Ukraine closer to NATO, and also to reinforce a partnership of NATO and other countries in the world. The Ukrainian president Zelensky underlined the fact that Ukraine would benefit from the largest military aid package ever granted. In the following days, the United States authorized exportation of fragmentation weapons to Ukraine, and guaranteed the exportation of war planes.

It also decided to offer Ukraine another 800 million dollars for the purchase of items of destruction.

All over the world, military budgets are rapidly being increased in the name of defending Ukrainian rights.

Who can believe for one second such rubbish? The profits in arms trade are swiftly increasing. But someone has to pay for that. On one hand, the onslaught against living standards and worker rights combines with the phenomenal extension of military expenditure. All the riches of Ukraine are now mortgaged in exchange for the generous help given to Ukraine. The wall between Ukraine and Russia is part and parcel of the march towards the Third World War.

What was diplomatically worded at the NATO summit is an escalation of the preparations of a generalized war in which Russia is but one target and not necessarily the most central: China is at the center of the world offensive of imperialism. That’s why such an importance is given to developments in Asia, and also gives all its meaning to the choice of Hiroshima as the venue for the 7 great powers’ previous meeting.

That means that the answers put forward in the Japanese labour movement are meaningful for the international labour movement. That is why some questions must be raised and discussed in relation to the stand taken by organizers of the international anti-war assembly in Japan.

They expose the disagreement with the call for an immediate cease-fire. They write “There are some ‘leftists’ who are crying out for an immediate cease-fire and talks. That is tantamount to pressing Ukrainians to surrender the occupied territories to Russia. But if they call themselves ‘leftists’ they should first and foremost stand by the side of these people who are waging a life-risking battle against the invading army.” Such a statement has no validity whatsoever. If, for the sake of argument, we put aside for a moment the problems of imperialism, of class forces, and regard the question of a cease-fire, only at the technical level, a cease-fire is one act which may take place between two countries engaged in armed conflict without meaning that one side gives up its demands.

Now, if we turn to the political meaning of the demand for an immediate cease-fire, it means first of all that Ukrainian and Russian workers and youth will stop killing each other, that the alteration in military constraints will give them more space for their common demands.

That’s why neither Putin nor Biden, nor any capitalist leader is putting forward, at this stage, the question of a cease-fire. They may do so at some point, if they reach between themselves an agreement contrary to the interests of the people.

It is not the case today: Biden is ready to fight to the last Ukrainian soldier; Putin cannot admit his failure.

The preparation of a generalized war springs from the acute world crisis of the capitalist exploitation system.

If Biden wants the war to go on and grow in intensity and in space, it is because the war offers a temporary way-out for the capitalist world system and ensures the leading position of American imperialism.

Since the war started in February 2022, American imperialism has witnessed changes in relation with other imperialisms and command of the world market. The fantastic rise in military spending worldwide has first of all benefitted to the American war industry. At the same time, the position of the United States in the world energy market has been transformed, the situation in the east of Europe has opened new possibilities for American agriculture…

Why should any of the forces which benefit from the war stop it?

From the very first day of Putin’s aggression against Ukraine, in February 2022, the OCRFI denounced the reactionary character of Putin’s decision and called for the immediate withdrawal of Russian armed forces from Ukraine as the only solution answering the needs of the Ukrainian and Russian working class.

We stated then, and we still advocate:             

“No to Putin, no to Biden and his allies. No holy union with the war-mongering governments. Russian troops out of Ukraine, dismantlement of NATO.”

There is nothing progressive, or in conformity with the interests of the working class worldwide in the decisions taken by Putin with the hope that a return to the Russian Empire would strengthen the capitalist oligarchs he represents. But it is not Putin’s war, viewed in isolation: it is totally interlocked in the general counter-revolutionary moves of world imperialism.

It can only be fought on the basis of internationalism, of the unity of interests of the workers of the world.

The roots of the policy put forward by the OCRFI are in the whole experience verified and enriched by the experience of the opposition to the first imperialist war. It means first and foremost that our main enemy is in “our own country”. The main enemy of the working class of each country is its own government.

That means it is from there that flows the policy and action of the OCRFI, its will to unite in action with all forces calling for an immediate cease-fire, while defending the totality of its positions, while fighting for a break within the labour movement with all policies of submission to an alliance with the exploiting class and its governments.

What are the interests of the world working class regarding China?

In spite of the accommodating policy of the ruling bureaucracy in China and its ceaseless attempts to find an agreement with imperialism, China, the Chinese State and its sovereignty are under threat. War against China is now part of American policy. The deep organic crisis of world imperialism means that imperialism now needs to reassess its direct control of the vast Chinese market, and therefore eliminates, in one way or another, what is left of the conquests of the 1949 revolution.

The re-establishment of capitalist relations and therefore of imperialist domination over China will mean a tragedy for the Chinese workers and would be a severe blow carried against the world working class.

The defence of China, of the Chinese working class, of the State character of the main productive forces can only be carried in full independence in relation to the corrupt bureaucracy in power. All the attacks against democratic rights, against the rights of the working class to organize on the part of the bureaucracy weaken the ability of the Chinese people to resist imperialist attacks, in Hong Kong as well as in mainland China.
China has been in the last period the scene of huge independent organizations of the working class for its interests and demands. The ruling bureaucracy and imperialism both hear that movement. It is the duty of the labour movement internationally to defend it. That defence includes the defence of all the elements which forbid, for the time being, the return to full capitalist relations in China.

Those questions, and many others linked to the problem of the independence and leadership of the world working class are at the core of the conference organized by the OCRFI and due in November 2023.

Organizing Committee for the Reconstitution of the Fourth International (OCRFI),
August 9^th, 2023