Message of the Permanent Revolution Collective to the 46^th International Antiwar Assembly in Japan

 

Workers’ united front against imperialist attacks, against the occupations of Iraq and of Afghanistan, against militarism!
For the world socialist revolution which will eradicate their roots!

Comrades,

We warm any anti-war and anti-imperialist action, especially when coming from those who, like you, have understood that the main enemy is located within their own country. Indeed, the Yasuo Fukuda government acts on the behalf of the Japanese capitalist corporate groups. Like all the previous LDP governments, it leads an anti-workers policy along with military interventions abroad.

The youth in Japan played a worldwide role in 1968. Due to class collaboration policies and to betrayals by the reformist parties and by the union leaderships, due to the counter-revolutionaries alliances between Washington and Beijing, and between Washington and Moscow, the world bourgeoisie overcome the 1960-1970’s revolutionary wave, and took the initiative back during the 1980’s. Both centrism, in capitulating to Stalinism, social-democracy and bourgeois nationalism, and leftism, in turning its back on the proletariat, facilitated the reactionary backlash.

In the advanced capitalist countries, with the use of the pressure of unemployment and of the competition of the workers of the dominated countries, the bourgeoisie closed the former workers’ bastions, restructured firms, unindexed wages and restricted the workers’ right to strike. The state bureaucracies restored capitalism in Russia and in China; so the workers in these countries are submitted to exploitation and job insecurity. The bourgeoisie became then allowed to increase exploitation in the imperialist countries, to reach new markets and to exploit millions of workers that it could not exploit before due to collective ownership, to planning and to the monopoly of external trade, so that the rate of profit could recover.

Even if the rate of profit temporarily recovered, capitalism is still a declining mode of production, and this is recent proved by the banking crisis and by the “hunger revolts”, but also by the invasion of Iraq and of Afghanistan and by the rise in religious fundamentalisms. The capitalist mode of production achieved its historical function for long: the breaking-up of archaic social relations, the development science and technique, the overcoming of local specificities thanks to national states, the expansion of industry and transports, the building of a world market…

The narrowness of the frontiers and the private ownership of the means of production impede the development of the productive forces of humanity. The survival of capitalism brings an uninterrupted sequence of wars and economic crises. Economic crises, from which workers are the first victims, are inevitably resulting from the contradictions of capitalism. They stand as a temporary solution to the over-accumulation of capital. The situation is the same with wars, which can both temporarily solve the demand problems and threaten or enslave other countries. Actually, at the time of imperialism, militarism cannot be separated from capitalism.

Everywhere job security, social welfare and public services are reduced; the taxation of the rich decreases whereas the taxation on consumption increases, together with profits and military expenditure. Even if science and technique have reached a high level, a strong part of the producers do not even have a proper housing, only has a restricted access to health, to education, to culture; millions of human beings get neither drinkable water nor sufficient food. Research is made for war and speculation. Computer science is used for spying individuals, for controlling workers and for intensifying work. Individuals’ moving is restricted and sometimes forbidden. The accumulation of capital and the research of profit threaten environment and even the humankind.

Still, the bourgeoisie does not disappear from history. It remains the hegemonic social class: in normal times, it rules thanks both to the repressive state apparatus and to its ideological domination. Religion is an old device for justifying private ownership and social inequalities, and its most reactionary expressions reappear, both in ruling countries (regression of secularity, invasion of Iraq in the name of Christianity…) and in dominated countries (Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic… clericalism, dividing the oppressed and counter-revolutionaries through and part). As a proof of the more and more sophisticated social power of the bourgeoisie, the leaders of the organizations that were built by and for the oppressed and the exploited are often corrupted and integrated to the state, which leads to the decay of the workers’ movement with the so-called-reformist parties and the union bureaucracies.

Only the proletariat, the social class which interests are antagonistic to the bourgeoisie, can expel it through a world revolution, and pave the way for a higher mode of production, namely socialism. Only the working class, which have become bigger and bigger in the “emergent nations” of Latin America and Asia, can give a solution to humanity. For that, it has to lead all the oppressed in the countryside and in the cities, it has to build and to centralize democratic organs for struggle, to destroy the bourgeois state, to expropriate the corporate firms, to extend the revolution, to cooperate with the other workers’ governments resulting from it. Then the conditions for socialism will be met: development of productive forces, planning by the associate producers, removal of the boarders, withering away of the social classes and of the state.

The fierce resistance of the workers, employees, peasants, students, women, oppressed people are many, both in the imperialist countries (including the United States), in the dominated capitalist countries (especially Latin America) and in the new capitalist countries (especially in China). In order to win, not only the workers need to fight against the bosses, against the governments working for them, their repressive bodies, but they also need to overcome the barriers that are built by the agents of the bourgeoisie, who submit them to the bourgeoisie, to their own oppressors. They need their own party, which fights for breaking up with the bourgeoisie, for auto-organizing the workers, for taking the power. Based upon Marxism as the theory of revolution and of emancipation, the most conscious workers and young people must unite in such parties, together in a Revolutionary Workers’ International.

For getting together, among other means, we need anti-imperialist and anti-militarist slogans, to be addressed to the mass workers’ organizations:

•              Immediate withdrawal of all imperialist troops from Iraq, from Afghanistan, from Lebanon, from Ivory Coast, from Chad, from Kosovo…!

•              Closing of all American, French, British military bases, to begin with Guantanamo!

•              End of threats against Iran, end of blockade against Cuba and North Korea!

1^st August 2008

Permanent Revolution Collective (CRP Peru, GB France, PRK Austria)

www.derneuekurs.net.tf

www.luchamarxista.blogspot.com

www.revolution-socialiste.info