THE INTERNATIONAL WORKING CLASS CAN STOP GENOCIDAL WARS!
The genocide in Gaza proves that we are in an accelerated moment in the history of class struggle. Today the oppressed are rising up in rebellion against the terminal crisis of capitalism; its deprivations, austerities, debt collection, ethnic cleansing and land grabs etc. Militants everywhere around the globe see the U.S. role in Gaza for what it is! No one is fooled by the “restraint” posturing of governments: the U.S. sends the IOF (IDF) its weapons, the operatives seek the elimination of the Palestinians.
The imperialist propagandists and their apologists label the rebellious as ‘terrorists’, ‘gangsters’, ‘rapists‘,’ ‘baby-killers‘,’ and ‘sub-human pests’ who, they say, “do not value life as we do!” They peddle the same lies against the oppressed people’s uprisings today as their predecessors did against all the indigenous resistance movements destroyed by European settler colonialists from Haiti in 1789 to Palestine in 2023! We reject their hypocritical propaganda, we defend those who expose their lies and call for united labor action against the crimes of capitalist imperialism, its wars, genocides and rape of the planet.
In Palestine, Sudan, Kenya, New Caledonia and Haiti the masses are learning that the conquest of bread requires armed social revolution. Today the Palestine Resistance is the vanguard of the world revolution. We, as part of the internationalist working class, must escalate this resistance into a generalized uprising uniting the international working class against all capitalist states, capitalist parties and their apologists.
“The decay and destruction of global capitalism is centered in the bourgeois leadership of the US ruling class, the ‘neo conservatives,’ who know there is no future for their class short of winning a war. These warmongers claim that the US can survive a nuclear war and continue to rule over the planet.” (Class Struggle #149 editorial)
To end their wars and genocides, to mitigate the climate crisis, to feed, clothe, and educate the people, to provide health care, child care, elder care, housing and a quality life for all, the working class must take political and economic power away from the capitalist ruling class.
To do so the working class must be armed with its own class struggle party and program to build independent class organizations, expropriating the means of production from the capitalists, overturning the profit system and building a new planned economy based on human needs and species survival.
Today, despite the objective necessity of socialist revolution and the acceleration of events, the working class still has not constructed its revolutionary party; and, despite what anarchists, evolutionary socialists and idealist reformers will tell you, the revolution will not make itself! Spontaneous, isolated and even generalized uprisings reach a point of indecision. The movement either presses forward for power or retreats in defeat and accepts the status quo. And there is no shortage of misleaders prepared to corral the masses back into reformism, pacifism and pressure politics in the shadow of the Democratic Party. Without leadership capable of navigating all such obstacles, leadership is conceded and the moment is lost; this is what Trotsky addressed in the first line of the 1938 Transitional Program, “The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterized by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat.”
To counter the backsliding influence of the traitors and pretenders, we must build a revolutionary party that unites the most authentic and uncompromising leaders dedicated to the task of workers taking power. As our class becomes a class for itself, honest militants, forced under the scrutiny of the masses, must rapidly resolve all unprincipled differences and launch the mass workers party based on a transitional program leading to the workers’ government. Every such party that emerges must be assembled in the class struggle where its method, theory and program are tested. A mass party of labor based on the unions where-in worker’s democracy ensures the rights of all participants such that individuals, tendencies, caucuses and factions have venues for democratic debate and means of taking centralized action.
Today there is no party which the workers can call their own, so its advocates, adherents and contenders must seize the historic moment and build workers united fronts that unite all workers and oppressed fighters engaged in the many flashpoints of the class war.
The United Front is a tactic we must use both skillfully and scientifically. First and foremost it is necessary to unite the workers in action against the ruling class. Simultaneously, and in the heat of the struggle, the rank and file activists must scrutinize the program and methods of all the workers’ parties, tendencies, unions and emergent leaders. Then participants must democratically correct any missteps, exposing dead ends and build the revolutionary party!
The urgent task is to build a global workers United Front against imperialist wars that threaten to escalate into world war! During WWI the Second International collapsed in their sworn duty to oppose the inter-imperialist war. Anti-war socialists had to reorganize the workers’ opposition to the war. They assembled at Zimmerwald launching a movement to found the new workers international for class war against imperialist war! We need a new Zimmerwald to rally the world’s workers to turn imperialist wars into civil wars against our imperialist ruling class.
To win we must start building class struggle union caucuses and inter-union councils to establish factory committees, workers defense guards, and convene mass assemblies as embryonic workers councils. We need to convene strike committees as the basis for workers councils that create the base to take state power. Our aim is to build workers’ governments based on workers’ councils to champion survival and the self-liberation of all the oppressed!
To have a future we must become the new generation of Union activists and wrest control of labor from the class collaborators. Class Struggle caucuses in the unions and mass movements must fight for leadership with a working class program of action leading to Workers Power!
To stop the genocidal war on Palestinians the labor movement must unite with the protestors to smash the injunctions, to expand and extend the student workers’ POLITICAL STRIKES, especially to the war industries, and to organize the port and transport workers to hot-cargo (refuse to handle) all military aid to Israel! Form up mass strike committees of the rank and file and anti-imperialist activists to expand the strike movement!
The Palestine Trade Union Federation has called upon the workers of the world to come to the defense of Palestine. The UAW Local 4811 and other education workers stepped up, striking just after the police shut the encampments down! To end the genocide and imperialist wars the ranks of labor must step up alongside these unionists and answer the call with SOLIDARITY ACTIONS NOW!
WE SAY DOWN WITH THE INJUNCTION AGAINST THE STRIKES! UAW COME TO THE AID OF PALESTINE AND UAW LOCAL 4811!
The leaders of our unions are state subordinated; they exclusively support the Democratic and Republican parties’ and their genocidal foreign policy. They avidly support or quietly acquiesce in the Zionist colonial settler state as it continues to eliminate the Palestinian people. They retail labor-management partnership with the bosses and will not defend workers exploited and oppressed either at home or abroad! They sell us out to keep their jobs disarming us before the rise of fascist militias. We know this because the labor bureaucracy can keep their jobs only by serving the bosses in preventing independent unions from fighting to build the organs of class power capable of winning a general strike, defeating fascism and seizing state power.
In the workers movement we find class traitors and social-imperialists of two types united with the bosses of competing imperialisms.
On one side the union leadership has joined the neocons along with many self-proclaimed socialists to side with the state department in the inter-imperialist wars. On the other side the so-called tankies (neo-Stalinists) find a progressive alternative among the authoritarian capitalist rulers of Russia and China. They have made peace with imperialism on one side or the other.
We have called for a new Zimmerwald movement to assemble all the forces who understand the necessity of a generalized revolt against all the capitalist rulers and their wars. Defeat the two imperialist blocs!
“Only the independent arming of the world’s workers can derail the bullet train of imperialist war. So the crisis of the world economy and the drive to war is in the final analysis the crisis of the leadership of the working class. We need a new international party of revolutionary Marxists to lead the fight to turn imperialist war into civil war – the class war between the bourgeois ruling class and the proletariat.” (Class Struggle #149 editorial)
Labor must inscribe the Permanent Revolution against imperialism on its banner! Our organizations must actively defend the right of occupied people to rebel against occupation, settler colonialism, apartheid and genocide! By any means necessary and every means available!
We call for international labor to forge a military bloc with Hamas and the entire Palestine resistance in struggle against the IOF (IDF). We do not give Hamas or any bourgeois organization any political support, and we fight for workers to take the leadership of the resistance. In Palestine, as everywhere on the planet, we fight for socialist revolution.
This means fraternization with and organizing a workers’ antiwar movement among the troops of all the imperialist nations and for international strikes to stop the war with a general revolt. Revolutionary workers agitate for the troops to refuse orders to attack the masses and instead advocate they arm and train the mass pickets, leading to Labor-led, Labor-Black-Brown Community Defense Guards! To tolerate no fascist violence or its mushrooming into their civil war dream of reaction we say ORGANIZE ENLISTED Service Members’ Unions! Bring the troops home and Union Sisters and Brothers in uniform will refuse to fight Capital’s racketeering wars! This is the proletarian military policy which arms the workers to turn imperialist wars into class war against the capitalists!
In the U.S., which is complicit in the Zionist genocide we must organize the workers for civil war against the ruling class at home to stop the genocide!
Victory to the Resistance! Defeat the IOF (IDF)! Drop the charges against the Palestine solidarity activists!
Reinstate solidarity activists and Palestinians to their jobs and matriculations!
Stop the Arms shipments! Tear down the Apartheid walls! Out with the Zionist occupiers!
Free Palestine! For a socialist Palestine! For a socialist federation of West Asia and North Africa!
Workers of the world unite! For world socialist revolution!
International Leninist Trotskyist Tendency (ILTT), June 28, 2024
