The following is from the group Deserters for Capitalist Peace in Greece. It refers to and attaches a further text from the group Proletarios Hartos de Serlo in Ecuador, South America. We publish it here as a contribution to the ongoing debate on internationalism.
For at least 15 years, a series of “emergencies” has been mobilised to ensure that workers work longer and longer, demand less and less, and are disciplined more and more. Our bosses and the capitalist state are trying to make us believe that their demands take precedence, that their interests are our interests, and that we must step back from defending our own needs.
Sometimes they invoke the “debt crisis,” which requires us to accept wage cuts and social spending; sometimes the “pandemic crisis,” which requires us to accept mass confinement and universal vaccination of the population; sometimes the “environmental crisis,” which requires us to fatalistically accept that “natural” disasters – which are, however, caused by the very expansion of the capital relation at the expense of nature – will continue to affect the population; and sometimes the “energy crisis,” which requires us to accept austerity as a natural event, and so on. These successive “emergencies” will be overcome, we are told, if the working class forgets its own interests and works to support national interests.
And if in times of capitalist peace all these are the sacrifices that state and capital demand of us, in times of capitalist war the proletariat is called upon to sacrifice their own lives to slaughter their class brothers and sisters in the name of national interest. And in order to wage the bosses’ war, the workers on the home front (both in non-war zones and especially in war zones) must produce weapons and everything the war front requires, without disturbing labor peace, and even more, with lower wages and heavier workloads, and with governments denouncing strikes as undermining the “national cause” (and, in the inglorious past of world wars, even as “treason”).
Today, in the midst of a war situation, we are once again being asked to “have their (the nation’s) back”, to pay the billions in war costs through poorer health care and education, inflation, even harder work, and increased precariousness and repression. To endure the misery of a paycheck that runs out before we the month is over while being faced with states claiming that the wars they themselves cause and support are responsible for the out-of-control cost of living.
What is the most appropriate response to the plans of capital and its state, whether in the West or in the war zones, so that the working class can defend its autonomy? How and why has the defense of all kinds of nationalisms taken precedence over the defense of our immediate class interests?
On the basis of these questions, we translate [in Greek] the proclamation text of the comrades of Proletarios Hartos de Serlo from Ecuador, in order to bring to the table an example of uncompromising proletarian internationalism, which we complement with the essential question of what is to be done here, in the rear of the war.
The proletarians of the war zones can actively pursue internationalist proletarian fraternity at the front, indifferent to who emerges victorious, undermining the army’s war activities, sabotaging, deserting and turning their weapons against their own officers. And if this is fitting for them, what is fitting for us here and for the proletariat of the Western metropolises, from a proletarian internationalist point of view, is not to take the side of one or the other nation-state or to get caught up in the perspective of “good” and “bad” nations, defending the national liberation of the most “wronged” nation against its subjugation to the powerful imperialist powers.
What we are responsible for is nothing less than sharpening the class struggle, collectively refusing to work, for example through strikes and sabotage, and attacking the production of war here, that is, attacking both the arms industry and the reproduction of capital as a whole. What is the point of the workers asking the states to provide the solution to the war conflicts that they have been created by the states themselves? For example, the cease-fire on the Russo-Ukrainian front and the return to capitalist peace will be made to give way to privatisations and harsh measures of capitalist restructuring. That is unless peace is imposed by the worker-social struggles themselves, both in the war zones and in the rear of the West, unless the power of the proletariat itself, as expressed in the sphere of production and beyond it, in the social factory, becomes the “peacemaking” (and at the same time revolutionary) force.
Against the meager “increases” that do not restore the wage losses and expenditure cuts in every sector of the social reproduction of the proletariat, against all kinds of cheap vouchers and passes of misery and state charity, against the new enclosures and the plundering of the natural environment by capital, against the fierceness of inflation, against all kinds of divisions and separations, national, racial, gender, and more, imposed by capital, our answer can only be the betrayal of every “national effort”, the revival of struggles, the outbreak of new strikes, protests, demonstrations, riots. By fighting against the austerity and intensification of labor that the bourgeois classes are trying to impose to fuel their wars, workers are actually fighting against the war, consciously or not.
As for the active war fronts, instead of supporting the “anarchists in uniform”, we support the 150,000 Ukrainians who have deserted in two and a half years of war, the Russians who don’t want to sign contracts with the Russian army, and the women in Transcarpathia who attacked border guards with stones and sticks when they were mistaken for conscripts! At the same time, we rejoice at the 270,000 thefts of firearms in Ukraine since the beginning of the war and the constant “unexplained” escapes of captured soldiers from both opposing camps!
We serve no anti-imperialist, social-patriotic or anarcho-Leninist perspective for national unity!
Autonomous proletarian struggle, no collaboration with the bourgeoisie, its state and trade union mediation!
Mass desertions and fraternisation of all sides at the front!
Sabotage and strikes in the factories of armaments, railway stations and ports!
We support in every way the deserters from all fronts!
Deserters from Capitalist Peace
peacedeserters@riseup.net
November 20, 2024