ITALIAN PROLETARIANS!

On the various fronts of the war, the fratricidal massacre continues with more and more terrible violence, the massacre of populations in the agricultural and industrial centers of Italy does not stop. World capitalism seems to have no other way out than to give the conflict an increasingly deadly and destructive character: whole cities and villages are razed to the ground, women, children and the elderly are crushed by the inexorable mechanism of war, representing anti-proletarian violence.

Democratic capitalism has given to civilization that masterpiece of mechanical science called “flying fortresses” while the advocates of Nazi-fascist order boast of having exceeded all expectations in the inventive field, throwing into the conflict the deadly “V1”.

In this macabre duel of scientific competition, those who pay the price are the working masses of the whole world, and the proletarian youth of Germany, Italy, England, America, Russia and all other countries.

PROLETARIANS!

The political victory of your class would have prevented humanity from falling into the current abyss, for your victory would have laid the initial foundations of socialism, which is the clear antithesis to war, to all wars. The world capitalist class, driven by its brutal selfishness, does not want to recognize the end of its domination, does not want to leave power to the working class, the only healthy force capable of marching towards the highest goals of progress.

At the service of your enemy (capitalism) are two parties which, taking advantage of their by now distant proletarian origin, dare to call you to war: they call you to fratricidal slaughter in the name of communism, socialism, democracy, freedom, with the same shameless brazenness as the fascists, the last edition of the Social Republic.

WORKERS!

The defeats suffered by your class in the long period of thirty years, must not be in vain, they must serve as lessons from which the directives that lead your struggle and your victory will be taken from. You must not allow organisms condemned by history to assume the right to lead you to a new and certain defeat in the historical battle against a class which, in order to stay in power, is capable of the lowest tricks and the lowest crimes. It is not possible – and you must not believe in the revolutionary potential of the Socialist Party and the Italian Communist Party.

The first party abandoned you in the 1914-18 war; the opportunist formula (neither joining nor sabotaging the war) used by it at that time could not be a class directive for you, and therefore it left you at the mercy of your class enemy, who was able to crush you on the rocks of the Carso. And it was this same party, which had abandoned you in the war, because of its opportunism that it led to a defeat of the revolution of 1919-20.

The other party, the Italian Communist Party, which had arisen in Livorno in 1921 in response to socialist opportunism and betrayal, was completely emptied of its revolutionary content and fell into the abyss of betrayal of all revolutionary principles, joining in the same patriotic slime the social democrats of the Second International.

And today these organisms have no other directions to give you besides the struggle for national freedom, the anti-German struggle, the struggle for bourgeois democracy, etc. etc. These parties which claim to be proletarian have become parties of the government, parties of the sacred union for the continuation of the war to the end, that is, for your total massacre, competing in the field of interventionist and war propaganda with the Nazi-fascist criminals themselves.

WORKERS!

No wonder the counter-revolutionary traitors of yesterday are meeting with those of today. The social-democrats of 1914-18 and the Stalinists of 1939-44, are fraternally together in the role of vanguard of the war for your mutual slaughter.

If the social-democrat and Stalinist counter-revolutionaries, betraying the fundamental postulates of Marxism, succeeded in dragging you into the present conflict, you must not allow them to prevent you from breaking the infernal circle of their war, the expression of your death, just as you must not allow them to cross the road of the revolution, the expression of your life. To march toward this goal you must follow these directives:
     1) Desert the war in all its various manifestations: the Nazi-fascist war, the democratic war and the partisan war.
     2) Do not give a man or a penny to war, not even if it presents itself under the hypocritical guise of solidarity, charity, etc., etc.
     3) Sabotage war by striking at its natural source, the productive apparatus. The machine which has become the prey of war, and therefore the producer of proletarian death, must be annihilated.
     4) Proletarian solidarity must be fully manifested towards the deserters of the war; by deserters we mean those proletarians who, by deserting the war, place themselves on a defensive waiting ground, ready to participate in the next great class battles in the proletarian centers. The proletarian deserter of the fascist war, if he accepts the discipline of the partisan directive and of the National Liberation Committee, loses his revolutionary physiognomy.
     5) We must reject the nationalist, and therefore anti-proletarian, slogan of the hunt for the German, English, American and Russian soldier; all these soldiers are proletarians, who, at the first flashes of social redemption, will join you in fighting against their leaders and, stripping off their infamous militarist uniforms, will march by your side towards power.
     6) We must be on our guard against certain watchwords which have in themselves a revolutionary content, but lose their force and serve the interests of war if their application is not matched by favorable conditions of struggle. Those who call the proletariat to the insurrectionary strike, when the capitalist state is still in full efficiency, have the following twofold purpose: to use the workers for their imperialist war purposes – to bleed and demoralize the proletariat to reduce it to a state of inferiority, when in a favorable situation, the hour will sound for the arms race to strike capitalism to death.

PROLETARIAN WORKERS!

The war takes on more and more deadly aspects, capitalism itself, direct accomplice in the unleashing of the conflict, is forced to confess its inability to stop the motion of the steamroller that inexorably spreads in every proletarian center. The physical existence of your class is threatened with total destruction: to crush the deadly danger that hangs over you and your families, that is the immediate duty.

There is no hope of putting an end to this war which is devouring your flesh, without your intervention, without the movement of your class, without the total vindication of all your rights.

The massacre has been going on for almost five years; for years and years the intoxication has consisted in making you believe, by hammering you with nonstop propaganda, that the war would end with a military victory for Germany; today the same enemy of yours, under other guises, can continue to make you accept the war, preaching to you an end to the war with the victory of the united nations. All this is to prevent you from becoming conscious of your strength and your ability to fight on the class terrain.

Remember what you could have achieved a year ago if the preventive maneuver of the monarchy and the five parties had not succeeded in preventing you from taking anti-capitalist action. July 25, instead of resolving itself in a pure change of the government guard, would have marked an unparalleled historical date, if you proletarians had been able to avoid the enemy maneuver and unleash yourselves on the ground of revolutionary action.

The German proletariat watched you anxiously, in the hope that your action would give it the possibility of propping itself up, in order to get out of the inexorable grip of war.

But the enemy, with the help of the social-democrat and Stalinist counter-revolutionaries, succeeded in reconnecting you to the war, the spark that was supposed to ignite the European powder keg was extinguished, and the specter of war came back to dominate you.

ITALIAN PROLETARIANS!

It cannot be ruled out that in a short time the situation will allow you to be the vanguard of the struggle of the world proletariat: your duty must be manifested from this moment on, not lending yourselves to capitalist maneuvers, be they Nazi-fascist or democratic. There must be only one objective for you: the daily struggle against war, the basis of the finalist struggle for the overthrow of the capitalist regime.

PROLETARIANS!

On the flag of the proletarian class is written:
     - Down with the ruling class! Down with the opportunists and careerists!
     - Long live the proletarian dictatorship! Long live the Italian and world revolution!

The Federal Committee of the Internationalist Communist Party of Lombardy