One phase of your factory agitations has just ended, and already the struggle is being resumed; you are not being given what was only partially granted to you; and even if it were granted, it could not, as it will not be able tomorrow, to satisfy your needs and those of your families, since your wages do not allow for the luxury of buying on the black market, and with your wage you have just enough to keep yourselves from starving.

Our party warned you that such a situation would soon arise, since the dead end into which the capitalist economy has fallen has thrown all the contingent economic and moral claims of the working class into a blind alley.

Why all this?

The reason is to be found in the war which for five years now has been fed exclusively by your blood on the various fronts of the conflict, and by your sweat and your bread at the workplace.

On the contrary, we tell you that your conditions will continue to worsen despite the strikes you will be forced to undertake, because up to now your struggle has lacked a clear political vision of your fundamental tasks and, above all, it has lacked a truly class-based leadership animated by the spirit of revolution. In fact, you have gone and continue to go unarmed before your bosses and their political thugs, because your terrible weapon of struggle, the strike, has been practically blunted. This was due to not placing at the center of your movement the problem of the struggle against the war, on the contrary, to allowing political forces alien to you, i.e., that of the six-party bloc, headed by the Stalinist communist party, to take the leadership of your movement in order to drag it onto the anti-worker and counter-revolutionary political ground of the national war.

Thus, not only have you been mocked by a “victory” that leaves your belly as empty as before, but, what is worse, you have unconsciously lent yourselves to a worse political maneuver, the consequence of a class defeat, because it demeans and dishonors the ideal and political reasons for the struggle of the proletariat. Isn’t the imperialist war the most ferocious, the most inhuman, the most murderous war waged by the bourgeoisie against the proletariat? To place oneself on this plane therefore means to do the destructive work of the enemy class to the detriment of one’s own class.

Against your fascist masters who, by partially satisfying your demands, try to enlist you once more in their war; against those who, taking advantage of your economic conditions and of your natural hatred against bloodthirsty fascism, incite you to repeated strikes, because this is perfectly in line with their plan as warmongers who operate today as the vanguard of the allied army, the so-called liberator, and will operate tomorrow at its side for the continuation of the democratic war; against those who try to channel your struggle into the front of national liberation by pretending to ignore that the “fatherland” of the proletariat, that of labor and solidarity without borders, has nothing in common with the “fatherland” of the bourgeoisie; you, workers, respond with the words of Lenin: “War is an inevitable stage of capitalism, as normal a form of capitalist life as peace”. The refusal to serve in the military, the strikes against war and similar things, are pure stupidity, a pale and cowardly dream of helpless struggle against the armed bourgeoisie, a sighing desire to achieve the annihilation of capitalism without a desperate civil war. Today, closed in on itself, the struggle for immediate economic demands loses meaning and value; what good would the partial satisfaction of your demands do if the immense massacre continued to suck your blood and sweat?

WORKERS!

The present time calls for the formation of a united proletarian front, that is, the union of all those who do not want war, whether fascist or democratic.

Workers of all proletarian and non-party political formations! Join our workers, discuss together class problems in the light of the events of the war and form together in every factory, in every center, committees of the united front capable of bringing the struggle of the proletariat back to its true class terrain.

The united front among workers will be a living and working reality on the sole condition that you, whatever your party political position, agree on the following

Theses on the war

1) - The imperialist war is the most extensive, violent and corrupting attempt conducted against the proletariat in order to bar it from the road that leads to the conquest of power;

2) - Between the two poles of the war, the fascist and the democratic, the first a synthesis of violence and the second of corruption, the proletariat expresses aversion to both as only ostensibly different aspects of the same capitalist reality;

3) - No one will be willing to give credit to the old and laughable story of the “tactical maneuver”, which involves the fight against the greater evil (read: Nazi-fascism) to prefer the alliance to the lesser evil (read: democratic dictatorship);

4) - The watchwords of armed insurrection, dear to the guerrillas of national liberation, is only revolutionary phraseology that hides the betrayal of the proletarian revolution and aims to create for the six party bloc a sufficient electoral base for the climb to political power.

Theses on labor struggles

5) - In the present phase of the crisis and under the most furious raging of the war, wage demands or demands of political contingency, if on the one hand they express the serious and urgent needs of the masses and are inevitable, as inevitable and irrepressible is the proletarian right to make use of its own means for the defense of its interests, on the other hand, they would be in practice vain and illusory if the proletariat did not have the consciousness that only the active, class-based aversion to war, only the ruthless war against imperialism in any disguise, only the victorious revolutionary struggle will assure power to the proletariat;

6) - It is necessary to distinguish between the strike, which is an organic expression of the workers’ struggle and a normal means of class defense, and the strikemania of those who bring to the leadership of the movement the mentality of Balkan guerrillas or armed gangs. This ultimately serves to render the weapon of the strike ineffective and to discredit it in the eyes of the masses.

Therefore, in solidarity with the strikes and with every class demonstration in the factories, and indeed promoters of their conduct, the workers should above all constantly, untiringly assert the supreme necessity of the struggle for proletarian power in whose historical climate peripheral struggles, in their very partiality and uselessness, are illuminated and thus assume class color and substance.

In a word, the conquest of power is on the historical agenda of today for the proletariat; everything else must be considered in function of this fundamental necessity

Theses on the organization of the “united proletarian front”

7) - On the basis of these theses, the workers (the label of their political faith does not matter) should make themselves the disseminators of the call of our party, and, having debated and clarified and accepted the ideas which are its justification, they should make themselves the initiators of the first contacts and the first organic groupings in the workplace. After all, the workers have clearly demonstrated that they are now masters in the art of organizing themselves in defiance of the bosses and their fascist servants.

8) - The workers’ united front groups together and cements the forces destined to fight on the class barricades against the war and its leading political forces, both fascist and democratic.

Its greatest and most urgent task is to prevent the workers from being plagued by war propaganda, to unmask imperialist agents disguised as revolutionaries and to prevent the spirit of struggle and sacrifice that animates the proletariat from being exploited for the purposes of the war and its continuation, even under the banner of democratic freedom.

     Long live the workers united front for the fight against war!
     Long live the proletarian revolution!

The Central Committee of the Internationalist Communist Party