Week after week the trumpets and drums of war are getting louder and louder, with Europe in the first line. While the imperialist slaughter in Ukraine is raging on, European members of NATO are calling and planning for “preparations for war ”, “war economy”, reinstating military conscription, stoking reactionary nationalism and xenophobia. The EU and its member states increase their military budgets, preparing to make the workers and the youth "cannon fodder" to prop up their share in the re-division of the world.
Israel's genocidal war against the Palestinian people has just completed 6 months with tens of thousands of Palestinian children and old people dead, thanks to the sponsorship of the USA and other imperialist powers on which it relies to commit daily massacres with total impunity.
At the time of drafting this internationalist appeal for May 1st, international political tension has become significantly more severe, threatening to break out into a generalized war in the Middle East.
The Netanyahu government's evident attempt to overcome its difficulties by expanding the war to the entire Middle East region must lead us to further strengthen the international mobilisation against the Zionist state and its protectors.
On the Pacific border of Eurasia, Japan’s government is revising the constitution - with the endorsement of the U.S. victors who imposed it on the defeated power, with the terror of two atomic bombs - in order to carry out an unrestrained, full-scale rearmament and face off China’s growing economic influence and military assertiveness in the region, where Taiwan’s future is playing the role of a time bomb.
The global context of capitalist crisis and growing rivalry between capitalist powers, including Russia and China, are undermining the industrial and financial supremacy of the established imperialist states, the U.S. and Europe. Far from creating a new balanced and peaceful equilibrium as the supporters of the “multipolar world” claim, this is pushing the declining powers to shore up their primacy through protectionism, state-funded industrial policy, and military intervention. The Third World War has never been so likely an outcome, whether intended or unintended, of inter-capitalist strife.
While the war in Ukraine is slaughtering hundreds of thousands people and displacing millions in the European core of capitalism, in the African continent - Sudan and Congo in the frontline – lower-intensity, but no less bloody wars are being waged in the clash between the same monopolies competing for natural resources and cheap labour.
Even in Latin America, whereas the confrontation between big powers does not explode in open wars, it manifests itself in the bourgeois support for military coups or right-wing caudillos (the latest being Milei in Argentina), usually aligned with the U.S. or European imperialisms, to carry out an open war against workers, taking away historic labour gains and the rights to self organisation, strike and protest. Only the independent struggle and mobilisation of the workers at the head of the exploited people, sustained by the unity of the employed and the unemployed can stop them, certainly not the centre-left bourgeois coalitions like Lula’s in Brazil, which are conciliating with the fascistoid military and also enacting capital-friendly legislation against labour, Peronism in Argentina or the Kemalist CHP in Turkey, which propose to the starving working people to "wait” until Milei or Erdogan “get worn out" in order to defeat them in faraway elections in 2027 or 2028.
Israel is taking advantage of this warlike and militaristic environment to achieve its “vital space” establishing a Greater Israel, going its own genocidal way against Gaza Palestinians, aiming at intensifying ethnic cleansing. Behind Israel stands its sponsor, the United States and Western imperialism, which, despite frictions and divergences, continue to support the genocide militarily and financially.
We revolutionaries uphold the right of the oppressed to revolt by all means. October 7 was a response to Israel's increasingly aggressive policy against the Palestinian people in Gaza, Jerusalem and the West Bank, which has put its leadership's commitment to the Oslo Accords and the unworkable two-state solution in crisis. We declare our unconditional support for the united front of the organizations of Palestinian resistance and we emphasise that the victory of the Palestinian people depends on transforming the current conflict into a revolution that will conquer a unique, secular and socialist Palestine, which is only possible with a revolutionary wave in the region, uniting in the struggle for a Socialist Federation of the Middle East.
The emotion, the indignation, the will to fight against Israel’s oppression and genocide in Palestine must help raise awareness of the larger picture of the other not less bloody wars, and of the looming danger of a Third World War. The workers, the proletarians called upon to accept heavy sacrifices for the economy of war, and to slaughter one another to decide who will exploit them, must reject these sacrifices, and declare war on the wars of capital and organise themselves to overthrow capitalist domination of the world.
May Day is the historical international day of the workers’ struggle for the reduction of working time and for emancipation from capitalist exploitation. May Day is also the workers’ international day of struggle against the bourgeois state, which has supported capital’s exploitation through all its powers: legislation that guarantees the “rights” of capital over wage slavery, the judicial that guarantees capital against any struggle that imperils class oppression (since hanging four worker leaders in Chicago in 1886), and the armed enforcement agencies that all over the world are waging the internal war to enforce exploitation against workers’ resistance through strikes and pickets.
The biggest danger facing workers and the whole humankind today is the danger of the capitalist governments dragging the people into a situation of generalised war, which means a worldwide butchery of the kind occurring in Ukraine, Sudan, Congo, Palestine. We must fight it right now, opposing the imperialist governments, perpetrators of the present wars, joining forces internationally in a proletarian camp, against the warring imperialist camps. It is not a question of opposing war with so-called pacifism. We must oppose the reactionary nationalist poison they are inculcating into the working class with the antidote of proletarian internationalism. We share our class interests to better wages, shorter work weeks, healthier work, and lives with other workers around the world. We share the deep desire to live in peace with our sisters and our brothers all over the world.
We declare our most fervent support for the struggle of the oppressed peoples who are facing imperialist oppression, conscious that the defeat of an oppressor nation is a blow to the imperialist world order and a lever to strengthen the cause of the exploited all over the world. The workers of the metropolises have the duty to mobilise within their own borders in support of the peoples who are victims of the subjugation of the imperialist bourgeoisie in their respective countries. This political mobilisation today is first of all in support of the Palestinian people.
Let’s oppose class fraternity between native born and immigrants to xenophobia aimed at dividing workers: our class is international, hundreds of millions of us are compelled by war, draught and climate change, land grabbing, to move from countryside to cities, or emigrate to other countries taking big risks. If native workers join their struggles with immigrant workers’, the latter won’t be used to push wages down.
Let’s oppose the war economy!
We must make it clear that in an imperialist war like Ukraine there is no side to be taken, that “the enemy is in our own country”. This war is an inter-imperialist war, disguised by each side with pseudo-progressive and pseudo-democratic arguments. The enemy for Russians and Ukrainians are their own governments, which have thrown hundreds of thousands of proletarians into the meat grinder of battlefields to kill and maim each other for the exploitative interests of their respective ruling classes. For workers of European and American NATO countries the enemy are their own governments, which are sending weapons, paid for by their own workers, for Ukrainians workers to shed their blood for NATO corporations to extend their exploitation to the Ukrainian territory and working class. On the other hand, Putin does not represent an anti-imperialist attempt, but seeks to secure the Russian capitalist oligarchy's share of the global pie, even resorting to a propaganda that attacks Lenin’s policy and glorifies Tsarist Russia.
All capitalist states, all governments, with their internal struggles and divisions, are expressions of profiteering bourgeoisies linked to the major imperialist powers, to the capitalist monopolies, to the international financial system, and are part and parcel of the social system that produces war. Although several countries have increasingly sharp conflicts with Western big capitalist powers, none of them can be allies in the workers’ war on war. It can easily be realized when looking at what kind of relations these states have with their working classes, and with the workers of the countries that are in their respective spheres of influence.
Our camp is not the camp of the bourgeois states, it is the camp of the exploited and oppressed classes, of the workers, of the international proletariat, the only class that has an interest, and has the strength - if it organises itself - to put an end to the wars that its exploiters wage at its expense. It is necessary for the organisations that stand on the ground of coherent proletarian internationalism, to come together in common initiatives. The time is now, before it is too late!
The past matters, but we will be judged from our ability to meet the challenges of our historical period head-on.
On May Day 2024 let us take the streets with the same watchwords all over the world:
- Stop the NATO-Russia war in Ukraine! "The enemy is at home!"
- NO to arms race and war economy! Free health care and education for all! Work less, work all!
- Stop genocide on Gaza, free Palestine! Let's support the Palestinian resistance! Stop national, racial, ethnic, religious oppression everywhere!
- No to imperialist meddling and proxy wars in Sudan, Congo, and everywhere!
- No to oppression of Kurds! Defend the self-determination right of Kurdish people.
- Down with reactionary nationalism and xenophobia! working-class internationalism!
- for a society without exploitation and war, of harmony between man and nature.
- For workers' governments and socialism.
Proletarians of all countries, let’s unite!
NAR, Greece
SEP, Turkey
TIR, Italy
SI Cobas, Italy
Laboratorio Político Iskra, Italy
Partido Obrero, Argentina
Polo Obrero, Argentina
OKDE Spartakos, Greece
Fuerza 18 de Octubre, Chile
Tribuna Classista, Brazil
UFCLP, United States
İnqilabin Sesi, Azerbaijan
Occhio de Clase, Italy
Colectivo Comunistas de Cuba
La Fragua, Uruguay
Red Action/Red Initiative (Croatia/Serbia)
