Leaflet distributed by the PCInt, in Italian and English, during the recent protests and strikes about the situation in Palestine.

The slaughter underway in the Middle East is another episode in the new phase of armed confrontation between opposing imperialisms which began with the war in Ukraine. On the one hand stands NATO-USA-Europe, on the other Russia-China-Iran. This is true in Ukraine, in the Middle East, and in other theatres of war. All evidence that conflict between the big imperialist powers, the race towards the catastrophe of a generalised war, is accelerating.

The root cause is capitalism’s structural crisis which is also bringing deepening economic and environmental crises. They all significantly worsen the living conditions of billions of people.

‘Democracy’, ‘national’ and ‘people's’ interests, ‘peace’ that must be defended with weapons, defence of ethical-religious "values": these are all falsehoods to disguise the real interests which move the imperialist predators to fight. Civilians are the ones who pay: primarily the proletariat and the dispossessed masses.

Hamas, a capitalist outfit built on Islamist fundamentalism, fiercely anti-communist and anti-proletarian, knew that the attack of 7 October would trigger the furious reaction of the Israeli state. This has transformed Gaza into a meat grinder, exacerbating the violence that is always employed against the proletariat and poorer strata of the Palestinian population. But neither ruling class cares about the suffering of the "common people", of the proletariat: this is just flesh to be exploited in times of peace, and cannon fodder in time of war.

Yet the massacres of Hamas and Israel are not just about defending their own exploiting class interests: behind them are the criminal Russian-Chinese-Iranian imperialists on the one hand and the equally criminal "Western" imperialists on the other.

The pro-nationalists, however they argue, are aiming to involve the working class in the war. But their so-called ‘struggles of oppressed peoples’ are simply the tools of local bosses and politicians: tools for the opposing imperialist camps to employ to get the proletariat and the dispossessed to shed their blood.

Yes, fighting, striking against the bosses’ wars is our duty: Just as long as the fight is directed against every capitalist faction and camp, every imperialist front. Any genuine proletarian resistance must start by rejecting the deception of a war unleashed in so-called defence of the freedom of oppressed peoples. Such phrases are used to disguise support for one of the warring capitalist gangs.

By contrast, revolutionary internationalists today believe that imperialist war, whatever disguise it takes, must be deserted, for in the bosses’ wars the working class has everything to lose and nothing to gain. The only viable alternative is to support the class struggle, to agitate for the creation of weapons and tools to construct an alternative to the present system, based on the general and international interests of the working class. Our weapons are: class consciousness, proletarian struggle, the bodies that arise from it, and the political tool indispensable for overcoming this society founded on exploitation, death and destruction: the international party of the proletarian revolution.

We must fight for class war, for the revolutionary construction of a different system:

• Against capitalism, imperialism, nationalism. No support for national capitals, or for states in formation, which would only be a new prison for the working class, an instrument that any fraction of the world bourgeoisie uses to oppress "its" proletariat, without sharing the fruit of oppression and exploitation with other fractions of the international bourgeoisie itself.
• For a society where states, wage labour, private property, money and production for profit are suppressed and replaced by a world of freely associated producers which respects the environment.
• Against the economic and political attacks that the current wars, and those to come, will unleash on wage workers: an economy conditioned by war, with worsening inflation paid for by the proletarians, is already proof of this.
• For the self-organised struggle of the working class, for the formation of independent strike/struggle committees, mass assemblies and workers' councils.
• Against oppression and exploitation, for the unity of the working class, against and beyond the divisions fomented by the class that exploits, oppresses and massacres: the international bourgeoisie and its local branches.