Considering 1: The March Toward Barbarism

Decaying capitalism is destroying the human species’ environment. It is exploiting the global proletariat with increasing ferocity while excluding 400 million people from production—a reserve army of labor that grows with every economic crisis.

The imperialist era is inseparable from war. There is no global bourgeois “empire,” no worldwide super-imperialism, no global dictatorship of international capitalist organizations (OECD, IMF, World Bank, WTO…). As economic growth falters, each national fraction of the global bourgeoisie escalates subsidies to its capitalist groups or implements protectionist measures, exacerbating the anarchy of global capitalism. Interstate organizations are breaking apart or withering away. The insurmountable division of the global bourgeoisie into archaic state structures is leading inexorably, if capitalism is not overthrown, to new confrontations between great imperialist powers, likely between the United States and China.

As inter-imperialist rivalries intensify, each bourgeoisie strengthens its military capabilities, stirs up nationalism, and prepares for potential conflicts. Military budgets are rising at rates that far exceed the limits imposed on other areas of public spending.

• American imperialism aims to maintain supremacy. The United States openly seeks to overthrow Venezuela’s government and imposes blockades on Russia, North Korea, Cuba, and Iran. Under its aegis, NATO has expanded with two new members (Sweden, Finland) and conducts numerous military maneuvers in Europe. Alongside Australia and the United Kingdom, it has formed a new military alliance for the Indo-Pacific region (AUKUS) directly targeting China. The U.S. and its allies also support, fund, and arm Israel.
• Chinese imperialism, young and dynamic, challenges the old division of the world. China competes with other powers for access to fossil fuels and mineral resources, depletes global fish stocks, purchases arable land in Africa, and has begun establishing military bases abroad. The Chinese bourgeoisie colonizes Tibet and Xinjiang and displays aggression toward Japan, Vietnam, and Taiwan.
• Russian imperialism resists German pressure in the west and U.S. pressure on all its borders, relying on its alliance with China. Russia maintains an iron grip on Chechnya and occupies parts of Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova. It intervenes openly in Syria and Libya and exploits mineral wealth in Mali, the Central African Republic, and Sudan at the expense of French imperialism. Through its small bloc (CSTO), it conducts joint military maneuvers, often involving Iran and North Korea.

Most other states align themselves with these poles, though the alliances are not fixed. In this contest for influence, the peoples—especially those in weaker countries—are little more than bargaining chips or, worse, testing grounds for plunder and military might.

In the face of competition, militarism, and rampant inflation, most bourgeoisies are rolling back the social concessions they previously granted. The ruling class systematically resorts to xenophobia and clericalism, restricting democratic freedoms where they were previously won. Even in the most democratic imperialist centers, the bourgeoisie is once again contemplating Bonapartist and fascist options.

Considering 2: The Crisis of Leadership

This brings to the forefront the proletariat’s struggle for social revolution and the conquest of power—the only path to transforming decaying capitalism into global socialism. However, no mass workers’ international remains to lead this fight. The Second International failed in 1914 when its main parties aligned with their respective bourgeoisies during the First World War (“national unity”). The Communist International, which was supposed to replace it, facilitated the victory of fascism in Germany by aggressively dividing the proletariat. Later, fully bureaucratized, it adopted alliances with so-called antifascist or democratic bourgeoisies (“popular front”) and prevented the revolution in Spain.

The ceding of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) to the German bourgeoisie and the restoration of capitalism by the privileged, usurping bureaucracies in Russia, China, and Vietnam shifted the global workers’ movement toward opportunism and integration into the bourgeois state.

Nevertheless, class struggle continues. But at every turn, the defense of social and political gains, resistance to exploitation, and opposition to oppression face obstacles from class collaborationist trade union bureaucracies (which, in most dominated countries, as well as in the United States and China, are under the control of a political faction of the bourgeoisie) and from the old bourgeois workers’ parties (“Labour,” “Socialist,” “Communist”) or newer ones (PT in Brazil, Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, Die Linke in Germany, LFI in France…).

During the phase of capital accumulation that followed the Second World War, reformist parties (bourgeois policy-makers emerging from the workers’ movement) and trade union leaderships claimed credit for the democratic and economic concessions the working class had won through its struggles. Today, bourgeois workers’ parties, when they come to power, offer nothing but budget austerity, militarism, and immigration restrictions. Trade union bureaucracies temper demands and restrain struggles to avoid harming “their” bourgeoisie, when they are not outright complicit in layoffs and the rollback of social gains.

Considering 3: The Deadlock of Anti-Globalism and Pacifism

In the 1930s, the degenerated USSR, while steering the Communist International into social-patriotism, launched international conferences “for peace and against fascism” (Amsterdam-Pleyel Movement, etc.). After dissolving the Communist International and during the Cold War, the Soviet bureaucracy intensified such pacifist, verbose, and impotent initiatives (e.g., the World Festival of Youth in 1947, the World Congress for Peace in 1948, the Stockholm Appeal in 1950).

Similarly, the World Social Forum (WSF), launched in 2001, was an international popular front involving Christian churches, environmentalist parties, and bourgeois governments (notably Brazil’s popular-front government), along with trade union bureaucracies, reformist parties, and centrist organizations (revolutionary in rhetoric, reformist in practice). The WSF opposed globalization, finance, and neoliberalism while banning workers’ parties from expressing themselves in its meetings, defending the strengthening of bourgeois states, and advocating protectionism. The WSF faded into irrelevance by 2021, having served for two decades only to delay a revolutionary socialist solution to capitalism’s historical crisis and hinder the construction of a revolutionary workers’ international.

On a smaller scale, two international colloquia convened in Milan in 2023 and 2024 by the sect Lotta Comunista (which equates Russia with Ukraine and Israel with Palestine and capitulates to the CGIL trade union bureaucracy in Italy) brought together anarchists, leftists, and centrists without any clear purpose. LC categorically rejected any common revolutionary struggle. These meetings served only to deceive the proletariat and further delay resolving the proletariat’s leadership crisis.

It is urgent to unite proletarian revolutionaries worldwide to act collectively on the basis of the communist program!

Axis 1: Against Imperialism and Militarism, Revolutionary Defeatism!

Several “Trotskyist” tendencies, lagging thirty years behind, still believe that Russia or China are workers’ states. This claim is used to justify the oppression of Uyghurs, threats against Taiwan, and the invasion of Ukraine.

Petty-bourgeois movements preach nonviolence and pacifism to the masses, arguing that the exploited in cities and the countryside should remain unarmed, while exploiters and mafiosi maintain their monopoly on weapons.

Social-imperialist parties seek to subordinate the exploited to their own rapacious and brutal bourgeoisie.

The working class must oppose military escalation, the march toward world war, all imperialist blocs, and militarism with its own methods:

• No to the protectionism of imperialist countries (USA, EU, China, Japan, UK…);
• Workers’ united front against military budgets—no workers’ party should vote for military funding;
• Unconditional destruction of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons of imperialist armies under workers’ control;
• End to scientific research for purposes of espionage and destruction;
• Expropriation of all capitalist arms manufacturers under workers’ control;
• Closure of all foreign military bases and withdrawal of fleets from international or foreign waters;
• End to secret diplomacy;
• Abolition of all imperialist military alliances;
• Democratic rights for conscripts;
• Replacement of standing armies with a militia inseparably tied to workplaces, working-class neighborhoods, villages, and universities.

Axis 2: To Preserve the Environment, Expropriate Capital!

Rotting capitalism degrades humanity’s environment through global warming, biodiversity loss, widespread pollution, the deterioration of arable land, and the scarcity of water.

The division of the planet into nation-states makes combating climate change nearly impossible. “Green capitalism,” international conferences, artificially created pseudo-markets (e.g., carbon pricing), and consumer guilt-tripping are mere stopgaps. Green-painted protectionism, “degrowth,” rejection of technological progress, and the utopian return to isolated agricultural and artisanal communities relying on grueling physical labor are reactionary.

Ecology is too serious a matter to be entrusted to environmentalist political parties. At best, these parties begin as petty-bourgeois but inevitably turn bourgeois once integrated into the capitalist state. When they gain power, they prove impotent in addressing the most pressing environmental challenges. They generally endorse militarism, which bolsters counterrevolution, destructive forces, and pollution.

To address ecological problems, eliminate fossil fuels (shale, coal, oil, natural gas), develop automation, and build intercontinental electric grids, capital must be expropriated, borders abolished, and production democratically planned. This requires a proletarian revolution and the establishment of a global socialist federation. For the global socialist revolution to triumph in time, the crisis of proletarian leadership must be resolved as quickly as possible.

Axis 3: Against Union Bureaucracies, Independent Unions and Class Struggle!

To combat worker division and xenophobia, we must demand free movement and residence for all workers and students, along with equal rights for all workers within each state. To address unemployment, we must enforce reduced working hours without salary cuts, initiate major public works under workers’ control, end the “labor market,” and collectivize the economy. In response to mass layoffs, workers must demand workforce control and the expropriation of large capitalist corporations.

When faced with attacks on social gains, inflation, or even a coup d’état, the working class must prepare for a general strike—an indefinite, unified strike until victory. Such opportunities arose in Britain and France in 2023, in Argentina and Bangladesh in 2024, and beyond.

Union bureaucracies, aided by reformist parties and centrist organizations, have thwarted general strikes by negotiating attacks with bourgeois governments, calling for scattered or single-day strikes, placing faith in bourgeois parliaments, and leaving workers unarmed against police repression.

Leftists abandon unions because they are bureaucratic and collaborationist; centrists capitulate to union apparatuses and often integrate into them. Both tendencies leave unions under the control of corrupt bureaucracies.

The proletariat needs a revolutionary workers’ international that can help build revolutionary workers’ parties in every country and establish class-struggle factions within mass unions that:

• Constantly confront bureaucracies corrupted by the bourgeoisie;
• Demand the greatest internal democracy (rank-and-file votes, the right to form tendencies, etc.);
• Fight for general strikes when the moment arises;
• Defend union independence from employers, the bourgeois state, and any bourgeois party;
• Promote workers’ self-management of social struggles (through general assemblies, election of committees, and the centralization of those committees).

Axis 4: Defense of Minorities and Oppressed Peoples, Hegemony of the Proletariat!

From its beginnings in the mid-19th century, communism has combined the proletarian class struggle with the fight for women’s emancipation and the defense of oppressed peoples—whether against slavery in the United States, for the independence of Poland and Ireland, or other causes. In the 20th century, revolutionary communists stood for women’s equality, the right of oppressed national minorities to secede, the unconditional independence of colonies, and against Zionism and the colonization of Palestine.

Today, the torch of proletarian internationalism must be taken up again, especially:

• Against the invasion of Ukraine, launched by the Russian bourgeois state, which has fabricated a fascist regime to justify its denial of the right of Ukrainians to a separate state, provided that the conflict does not evolve into a confrontation between imperialist powers;
• Against the Zionist state, founded on the colonization of Palestine, which invades and destroys Lebanon, colonizes the West Bank, and perpetrates genocide in Gaza.

In Palestine, the conquering and occupying army is Israeli. In Ukraine, the conquering and occupying army is Russian. Revolutionary communists reject petit-bourgeois pacifism, which is complicit with Zionism and Russian imperialism. They affirm the right of oppressed peoples to take up arms against their oppressors.

This does not imply any alignment with the current governments of threatened states (such as Zelensky’s anti-worker, chauvinistic government subservient to American imperialism) or with the leaderships of oppressed peoples’ movements (such as Gaza’s Hamas government, which is anticommunist, clerical, and today allied with reactionary regimes in Qatar, Iran, and Turkey; previously supported by Israel against the PLO when the latter fought for Palestine’s liberation).

Workers cannot trust any faction of the bourgeoisie. In the era of capitalist decay, the bourgeoisie can no longer lead revolutionary struggles. To liberate Ukraine, the Ukrainian bourgeoisie must be overthrown, and workers must appeal to those in Russia and across Europe. To liberate Palestine, the Palestinian bourgeoisie must also be overthrown, and workers in imperialist Western states (which arm and finance Israel) as well as those in the Middle East—whether Arab, Kurdish, Persian, Turkish, or Jewish—must be mobilized. Only worker-led parties united in a communist international can achieve this.

Axis 5: Against Parliamentary Illusions and Popular Fronts, Power to the Workers!

The agents of the bourgeoisie within the working class, among youth in training, in the middle classes, and in the oppressed masses promote the illusion that their fate depends on elections, referenda, constituent assemblies, parliamentary combinations, or alliances with certain wings of the bourgeoisie. These are variously presented as “anti-imperialist,” “antifascist,” “democratic,” “national,” or “ecological.”

In the era of imperialism and capitalist decline, the strategy of permanent revolution applies. National, democratic, social, and economic demands are indispensable, but they can only be secured through a revolution led by the proletariat.

The working class is the only progressive class. It can only defeat the bourgeoisie—who, in normal times, dominate all other classes economically, ideologically, and politically—by leading the fight against all forms of exploitation, oppression, and reactionary offensives. The struggle for hegemony encompasses everything from revolutionary participation in elections to armed insurrection (when the majority of the working class seeks power through soviets), through general strikes and united physical fronts against fascism.

In the 21st century, communist strategy excludes any alignment with a Bonapartist figure or “supreme savior,” any alliance with a bourgeois party, and any vote for bourgeois candidates or parties. Workers’ emancipation will be the work of the workers themselves!

We propose to groups, factions, tendencies, and revolutionary communist organizations worldwide, based on broad agreement on these programmatic axes:

• Joint international declarations on the major questions of the global class struggle (starting with the invasion of Lebanon and the genocide in Gaza);
• Mutual invitations to conferences, congresses, and training camps;
• Joint actions in each country where aligned organizations coexist;
• The drafting of theses on the fundamental questions of revolutionary strategy—

to prepare the unification within an international organization (centralized and democratic) based on the communist program, as the first step toward a revolutionary workers’ international.

November 18, 2024
Permanent Revolution Collective (Argentina, Austria, Spain, France, Turkey)