Proletarians!

The propaganda and the democratic military commands appeal to the population for the armed struggle against the German soldiers: in turn, Field Marshal Kesselring threatens in one of his manifestos (and has already put into practice) the slaughter of entire populations, the shooting of hostages, burning, hanging and other infamies in case his invitation to collaborate in the extermination of the partisans is not accepted.

Workers!

The communist left has always tried to enlighten you on the dangers posed to you by the maneuvering of the capitalist enemy. Guided by the fundamental concepts of class struggle, it can once again warn you against the enemy’s provocation under the triple guise of fascism, democracy and Stalinism and show you the right path of your battle.

Proletarians!

Your political attitude can never be oriented in the direction of accepting one or the other of the warnings issued by the grim striped puppets that world capitalism uses for your extermination. You cannot respond to the call of the butcher Alexander, for that would mean for you to descend to the terrain of provocation and war, that is, of your own death and fratricidal struggle: you cannot descend to the counter-revolutionary terrain which sets nation against nation and proletarians of one country against proletarians of other countries, and thus betray the principle of your struggle: class against class, proletariat against bourgeoisie.

But neither can you respond to the call of the hangman Kesselring, because that would mean descending to the level of police informers and collaborating for the maintenance of that capitalist order which represents your slavery and which you can only break through united class action, and not through acts of terrorism.

Proletarians!

By remaining deaf to the call of Alexander and Kesselring, you will give a conscious answer to the advocates of war, to provocateurs large and small, to capitalism throughout the world: you will take a stand in the struggle against the false path of those proletarians who act on the level of individual terrorism and, unknowingly, serve the provocative aims of the world capitalist class. But this position of yours of double negation of the war leads you automatically to the terrain of the defensive struggle. For if partisanism and individual terrorism are phenomena which have sprouted in the same environment of bourgeois society, the immediate conditions do not allow you to destroy this society and thus to eliminate forever not only individual acts of delinquency, nor that highest form of collective delinquency, unleashed against the proletariat, which is war.