May Day: Facing the Crises of Genocide, Global War and the Destruction of Our Planet!
The Gaza genocide, unlike past genocides like that of the Congo, is being watched on smart phones around the world. The Zionist propaganda machine reveals itself as ‘white washing’ the colonial settler state and its 75 year project of Palestinian expulsion. The Zionists claim that any criticism of the Zionist state is anti-semitic and based on Jew hatred. This lie has been exposed in the streets in ten thousand demonstrations around the world where anti-Zionist Jews join arm in arm with Palestinians and their millions of supporters to oppose the genocide. The Western world bourgeois regimes have lined up behind the genocidal strategy, while the rest of the world is screaming its support for the Palestinian bourgeois democratic right to self-determination. The means to fight genocide is limited only by the fact that workers lack a world party of socialist revolution which turns Palestinian national liberation into the cause for the global overthrow of the rotten and corrupt capitalist system which can survive only by means of genocide. The crisis of the survival of humanity as a whole comes down to the crisis of revolutionary leadership of the working class, ending capitalism and creating a socialist world.
In Israel, the U.S. and Germany, traditionally protected democratic rights to protest and speak out are being denied to students, academics and activists. Academics with tenure have been fired, suspended and hounded out of the profession. Student protesters are arrested and suspended from schools and universities and solidarity activists are targeted by the state and denied the right to speak to public forums.
Sustained protests for the duration of the genocide is radicalizing youth, many of whom were already politicized during the Black Lives Matter uprising and the strike wave that followed the end of the lockdown. This generation has already witnessed the false hope of the Democratic Socialists of America corralling activists as a left fringe of the imperialist Democratic Party. Kim Moody of Labor Notes writes in New Politics the electoral enthusiasm around Sanders and the Squad has faded as measured in hard currency contributions of small donors! It is past time to break with the capitalist parties of war, racism, sexism and strikebreaking!
As Marxists, we reject bourgeois pragmatism which began with genocide in the 16th century on the basis of racism and sexism. We reject electoralism which cannot cover up for genocide in Ukraine and Palestine. We defend the fundamental democratic right of youth to take to the streets and we recruit them to our PMP (proletarian military policy) alongside the ranks of the unions who need to organize self-defense militias against the state forces of imperialist powers of a system that is in its death agony. We know that class consciousness cannot blossom short of the lived experience of workers in struggle. And for that they need a political party that unites them on the basis of their common interest as workers creating the wealth, against racism, sexism and nationalism which the ruling class uses to divide and destroy our class.
By organizing our class in fighting labor parties we will destroy the hold of pragmatism, electoralism and divisions in our ranks and build a revolutionary movement. One capable of smashing the imperialist states and their proxies to raise up workers’ governments around the world that will expropriate the centuries of stolen wealth to build a socialist society. An egalitarian society which restores the harmony between humans and nature and creates the conditions for the survival of our planet.
Only fatalists think it will happen by itself! Even the capitalists’ spy agencies know better; that’s why they target the organizers of the workers and oppressed. We need an army of such organizers and leaders, a party to train them, and a class struggle that demonstrates its own power, independent and based on workers’ democracy! To begin, in the Unions we need class struggle caucuses that redirect the memberships’ thought and action away from class collaboration and to actions implementing a transitional program. These caucuses will fight to replace the class collaborators with ever more militant vanguard layers.
Only Trotsky’s Transitional Program for Permanent Revolution can arm the international working class to resolve the accelerating global terminal crisis of capitalism in decay. Unable to reverse the system in its terminal decline, the capitalist rulers have blown through every global warning marker. Oceans are warming, the poles are melting, reefs are dying, fisheries are depleted, climate systems change faster than the infrastructure designed for the 19th-20th centuries can be patched up by the capitalist grafters. The contending imperialist powers have turned trade wars into proxy wars over control of resources, markets and for strategic advantage. No surprise these rivalries are catastrophic for populations who find themselves in the way.
The Ukraine, Taiwan and Israeli regimes are wholly dependent on U.S.A. funding. The NATO encirclement of Russia is backfiring as the Ukrainian proxy regime is running short of ammunition and troops. Troops are mutinying, swimming across the Dnieper to safety. ‘Slava Ukraine’ is close to collapse as more men escape abroad rather than die in the meat grinder. Israel’s fragility is exposed; it is dependent on the U.S.A./UE (European Union) and NATO for both arms and defense. It cannot get away with its genocide of Palestine without the collaboration of the U.S.A. and the UE. Taiwan, despite its recognition as part of China, has been taken over and militarily occupied by the U.S. as a new proxy for the coming war: with China, Korea, Japan, the Philippines and the AUKUS partners mobilizing for war, coming perhaps as soon as next year.
In the imperialist nations vital resources are channeled away from social programs and into military production. In the U.S.A. the equivalent amount of the entire national debt has been spent on the military budget since 2000. Despite the enormous outlay, Russia has fought the US/NATO proxy Ukraine to a standstill in what is an inter-imperialist conflict. The $95 billion just allotted for wars in Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan by the bi-partisan neocon cabal in Washington can’t match Russian missile production, let alone sustain Israel in a regional war. Those billions will never be more than a digital blip on Ukraine or Israel’s financial radar; the profits will go to Raytheon, Boeing, Rand, GE and the military industrial complex.
In the semi-colonies a national bourgeois comprador class participates in the imperialist parasitism perilously navigating between the declining USA/EU bloc and the rising China/Russia bloc. To the imperialists they offer the resources of the nation and the working class chained to the factory floor and broken by their ideological servants in media, academia, the union leaderships and the reformist and centrist parties. The economic crisis and imperialist competition expresses itself acutely in semi colonies. The burden of the capitalist system failing to counteract the Law of Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall (LTRPTF) compounded by the necessary imperialist dynamic to dump the burden of the crisis on semi-colonies makes the working class in these countries super exploited.
South Africa, is threatened with sanctions for exposing the Gaza genocide to the world at the International Court of Justice. The sanctions only drive South Africa deeper into the China camp. The ANC and its left flank are hoping to attract Chinese investments which they then sell as ‘win-win’ deals to the masses as a path to a progressive form of state socialism modeled on China. U.S. imperialism responds by preparing for a ‘color revolution’ (HR 7256) backing the Democratic Alliance Party. Across the globe the workers, small farmers and oppressed are caught in a tug of war between these great powers!
In Zimbabwe, the state is attacking workers through capturing the dominant faction of the main trade union federation by enacting a Labour Amendment Act that criminalizes calling for and organizing collective job action. The state is maintaining a multi-currency system that they, together with business, manipulate to pay slave wages, giving the Chinese license and encouragement to disregard labor and environmental rights. Now they are introducing a new currency based on the theft of the value of workers incomes and savings. This goes along with the continued crackdown on basic worker rights to organize and strike and increased authoritarianism in defense of capitalist production with looting and corruption by the comprador bourgeoisie.
The rise of China as an imperialist state has found expression in the southern African region through fake anti-imperialist stances camouflaging the ongoing exploitation of labor power and the environment. Workers in the region must organize independently of both wings of imperialism and move beyond the collaborationist union leaders and bureaucrats through building shop floor controlled action bodies prepared to utilize tried and tested working class methods.
Imperialism is a death sentence for the workers of the world and only we can stop it! To do so we need our own political party, one based on working class political independence, based on our class experience of how labor is exploited by capitalism and how only class struggle and a transitional political program can resolve the crisis by building worker organizations to smash the capitalist state and create workers’ governments. Now is the moment to build a fighting workers-labor party and the revolutionary workers international needed to lead and coordinate the class struggle.
Our transitional program rejects the ideologies of pragmatism, patriarchy and post-modernism as the decadent genocidal culture of a dying capitalism throwing up and turbocharging all the old crap of past crimes against humanity. We reject racism, sexism and national chauvinism and denounce it as counter revolutionary. We affirm the positions of the Bolsheviks; down with Eurocentric white supremacy, national chauvinism of all shades, and the historic oppression of women. We build on the rich legacy of the historic collectivist struggles of slaves, women, peasants and workers in our struggle today. Workers and oppressed everywhere have the power and the will to resist and fight back.
The horror of the Zionist Israeli state violence against the Palestinian people cannot be stopped through moralist appeals to the parasitic exploiter class or their politicians! We need coordinated international actions: mass protests and worker actions such as labor political strikes, hot-cargoing of imperialist war goods to Israel, and sit-down strikes in the war industries. Workers parties, as part of a new Workers International, would organize and coordinate these actions on a world scale. But first we need to build our own mass revolutionary workers parties in every country to marshall the resources of the working class and poor farmers as one fist rather than atomized, decentralized, and apolitical protests sucked into single-issue dead ends and diversions in election years.
Independent workers parties and a workers’ international are needed that will take the rich historical lessons of the workers movement and encapsulate these lessons into a political program of transitional demands based on the method of Trotsky’s Fourth International that recognises the necessity for socialist revolution to halt the rush to extinction. For our class and species, we demand a future! For workers to live, imperialism must die!
Free Palestine!
Victory to Palestine! Defend the Palestinians! Drop all charges and free all Palestinian solidarity protesters! Down with Israel and theocracy! For a Socialist, federated West Asia!
We need to convene a new Zimmerwald to build a revolutionary opposition to inter-imperialist wars such as Ukraine and to agitate for dual defeatism to turn these wars into class wars at home against our “own” imperialist and proxy ruling classes.
Not one person, not one penny for the imperialist militaries! Billions for public works! Jobs for all through a 30 hour workweek at 40 hours pay! For a 100% cost of living increase linked to inflation!
For free quality healthcare, childcare, housing and education! For free abortion on demand! For women’s liberation through socialism!
The capitalists will only ever offer exploitation, war, racism, poverty, climate catastrophe…and fascism as their last line of defense. We need a Workers’ Government based on workers councils and defended by a workers militia to smash capitalism and carry out the tasks of building a socialist future.
For the nationalization without indemnification of the commanding heights of industry under democratic workers control as part of a centralized, planned world socialist economy.
Build Revolutionary Workers Parties and a new Revolutionary Workers International! For the World Socialist Revolution! Workers of the World Unite!
International Leninist Trotskyist Tendency (ILTT), 04/25/2024
