Workers, peasants, soldiers!

After four years of war, the balance sheet of the most frightful massacre in history can be explained in all its monstrous brutality. A gigantic steamroller, the war passed over and over every corner of Europe, destroying what generations of workers had built. And in order to feed it, the bourgeoisie has mobilized those gigantic riches about which it was so stingy when you asked for some bread; it has sacrificed that civilization which brought it to tears when the specter of revolution disturbed its sleep; it has sanctified that violence which aroused the hypocritical indignation of its moralists when the proletariat threatened to use it, with a different spirit and different proportions, to defend with its own rights the rights of the whole society. Everything has been used to preserve class privileges: the most refined resources of an intelligence which seemed so poor in inventiveness were called upon in the far more fruitful task of securing human conditions of life; the most bestial instincts, the most disgusting racist and nationalist hatreds, and the perversion of the noblest sentiments were played upon with diabolical refinement; they invoked the protection of a God ready to bless the cannons of all armies; they did not hesitate, in order to legitimize the carnage, to wave those same flags that in times of peace filled the honest bourgeois with dismay – freedom, social justice, socialism...

And in the meantime, while the war is drawing to a close, you glimpse the outlines of a peace that is promised to you, liberating you from all yokes and vindicating all your rights. The same bloody “peace” that you experienced under the Axis banners in the territories “protected” by Germany, you see taking shape in other forms in the countries that the Allied armies are rapidly “liberating”. You see the imperialist appetites fighting over this or that piece of land (only to be reconciled against you); the defeated peoples, who were reduced to the instruments of the victors, not by their own will but by the insatiable greed of the ruling class; the armistices accumulating bounties and reparations on already exhausted nations; the nationalist ideologies which they supposedly fought against have risen up even more fiercely, and the armies have been transformed into guardians of “order” – that order which can only be threatened by your class in order to build a more dignified society, socialist society.

Workers, peasants, soldiers!

Many of you believed that this war was your war. Or were you not promised on both sides that the fruits of the conflict would be yours? Today – after having experienced the harshness of the Nazi yoke and the fierce rage of fascism renamed Social Republican – you know whose fruits these will be: to bind you to the war and its immediate and distant events, two workers’ parties have shared with the class enemy the responsibility for the war itself and for power. “We fight united against fascism” they declared in the act of putting the proletarian forces at the service of bourgeois democracy, as if there could ever be, between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, a common enemy and a fraction of the bourgeoisie could be allowed to entrust the task of eradicating forever a boil that has its origins in the class domination of the bourgeoisie itself.

You have seen the parties that claim to be the heirs of two internationals preach not class struggle, but the hunt for the German, national unity, the ideology of the fatherland; you see them make workers and peasants in paramilitary partisan formations not the army of the revolution, but an instrument of war; you push for individual terrorism when the repressive apparatus is still able to “avenge its martyrs” with the massacre of twenty times as many of your brothers; to prepare, as in Warsaw and as in Paris, the proletarian insurrection not in order to secure your political power, but in order to pave the way for the triumphal entry of the armies, and to allow the Nazi-fascist beast to exercise once again on the proletarian vanguard, the last service rendered to capitalism at the point of death, the much sought-after profession of executioner. Finally, you see them, at the moment when the decline of the war would open to your fighting energies infinite possibilities, agreeing to collaborate with the bourgeois parties in the... restoration of peace!

Workers, peasants, soldiers!

The imminent collapse of the disgraced totalitarian regimes and the approaching end of the war mark the beginning of a period of crisis in bourgeois society and of great social unrest. The bourgeoisie can, with the support of socialist opportunism, win the war: but will it win the peace? Will it dominate the forces of a post-war period of misery and hunger, with a State apparatus in ruins, with armies tired of fighting and open to revolutionary contagion, with popular masses who will rightly demand the fulfillment of the promises on which war propaganda has been built? Thus, in the rapid development of gigantic social conflicts, the proletarian vanguard will be able to drag into the vortex of the revolution all the lower classes which the war has proletarianized. For this will then be the dilemma: either a new bourgeois era, harbinger of new and even more frightening conflicts, or, with your revolution, socialism.

But for this to happen, for your forces not to be used up once again for the benefit of the ruling class, it is necessary that the unrelenting struggle against war, to which we have not ceased to call you, spreads into civil war; that, against the unhealthy ideology which sets nation against nation, the consciousness of the fundamental antithesis which opposes class against class rises in you; that the proletariat may unite on the main road to the conquest of power around a party which is not afraid to point out the goal; and, finally, that above the frontiers, the working classes of all countries may re-establish those bonds of revolutionary solidarity which a long period of opportunism and war propaganda and five years of war have fatally broken.

That is why we appeal to you, and, through you, to the workers who work across the border, to those same proletarians who wear today, among you, the hated jacket of Nazi militarism, and to those who wear the hateful jacket of Anglo-Saxon or Russian militarism, to defend the “new order” so that you do not lend yourselves to the game of capitalism by chasing the phantoms of the “war of liberation” and of “progressive democracy” or by yielding to the allurements of the pro-democratic insurrection and tend all your forces towards that one goal which your class consciousness points out to you: the revolutionary conquest of power. On this hard path, firmly united in the mass organizations that will be born from the labor of your struggle, free from the heavy chain of compromise, led by a revolutionary party to which you will give the invaluable contribution of your soundest energies, there is a whole world to destroy – the old world of your servitude and your massacre – there is a whole new world to build.

Workers, peasants, soldiers!

The structure of the old capitalist society is tottering. Whoever invites you to fight for democracy, which only the proletarian revolution can give you, helps this rotten capitalist society back on their feet: whoever invites you to fight not only for the overthrow of fascism but for the revolutionary conquest of power gives this society the last death blow. Choose!

A hard struggle awaits the proletariat. It is a question of building up the ideological and practical apparatuses of the revolution which a fifteen-year period of errors and betrayals has smashed, of resuming the path soaked in proletarian blood of the October Revolution. But if the proletariat of Italy and of the world wants to win this struggle, it must know how to courageously face it.

The imperialist war can only be won by the proletarian revolution: only the revolutionary conquest of power can win true peace, the peace of a classless society. This is your banner: organize your ranks around it!

– For the international unity of the proletariat!
– For the destruction of capitalist society and the revolutionary conquest of power!
– Against the bourgeois war, against capitalist peace, long live the proletarian revolution.

The International Communist Party