Today’s demonstration is an important phase in the movement’s struggle against the "new war." It is all the more important because it is a message launched from the very heart of the most powerful center of imperialism. It addresses the masses of metropolitan workers who are threatened today by a most virulent capitalist offensive against their working conditions and the quality of their life, which are increasingly precarious and oppressive. We cannot defend ourselves against the corporations and their governments unless we fight against the wars instigated by their greed for profit all over the world. It is also a vitally important message to the oppressed peoples of the Southern world to let them know that the West is not inhabited solely by vampires of world finance and criminal instigators of wars but also by a class of people willing to combat them.
We militants of the Organizzazione Comunista Internazionalista enthusiastically support this initiative. We are here because we are convinced that this struggle must be carried beyond the confines of national borders. In order to combat the worldwide exploiting class with their super states, their financial institutions and their armies, we must work together to build an international unity of the proletariat and of the oppressed masses of the Southern world.
It is some years now that in the United States a new and active reaction is gathering force: we mean the renewal of the workers’ struggle and the resurgence of the unions, the women’s movement against poverty and violence, the students’ movements and their campaigns against sweat shops, and the activism of the African-American and the Latino communities. It is no coincidence that, in this renewed struggle, a major role has been played by immigrants and by African-Americans. It is also through their efforts that the momentum of the struggling masses of the Southern world has refueled that of the exploited metropolitan workers, leading to the Seattle and Genoa movement. The Patriotic Act, the "racial profiling" (as well as the recent anti-terrorism and anti-immigration laws adopted in Europe) and the violent anti-Islamic, nationalistic campaigns, all aim to block this resurgence and to prevent the construction of a common ground for struggle among "white" and immigrant workers, the proletariat of the Western world and the exploited masses of the Southern world, women of the Northern and Southern worlds, and all the different communities.
Thus, in the peripheral regions of the world, the hatred provoked by the long chain of "humanitarian" massacres—Iraq, Yugo-slavia, etc.—and by the "reconstruction plans" of the International Monetary Fund (Argentina, Turkey, etc.) begins to transform itself into resistance. The imperialists sought docile victims. They found, instead, masses of outcasts willing to resist them. For these exploiters, this is the real "terrorism" to combat. Today, once again, the Arab-Islamic masses are being punished for their determination (the foremost example: the Palestinian people!). For this reason, these people are assaulted and struck down, and Islam is being finger pointed as the "enemy" -- as though this were a "religious war" and not, instead, the resistance of an immense mass of underprivileged people seeking, by whatever means, their emancipation and freedom.
Their appeal to us (from the Middle East, from Argentina, from Durban, from the Porto Alegre of the masses and not that of the politicians) is a cry for help which we must heed today. We must give their struggles our unconditional support (despite their, at present, misdirected and unsuccessful programs) because theirs is an expression of the indomitable resistance of the anti-imperialist masses. Let us join forces with our class brothers and sisters to organize the struggle against a united world system that oppresses the working masses there as well as here. Let us work together so that from this drive and from this union will emerge the hope for an internationalist and anti-capitalist battle. Never was such a battle so necessary. Never has it been so true that it is global capitalism itself that feeds the foundation for the international, united front of the exploited.
The events taking place in the world today—from the war in Afghanistan and the economic disaster in Argentina to the recession, causing thousands to be laid-off, and the signs of social disintegration in the West—are symptoms, albeit still sporadic, of the crisis of a system which is founded on profit and on the exploitation on the basis of class, nationality, and gender. Our struggle, therefore, is called upon to address the central question facing the entire world: what should be the basis of our society? Should society be based upon a greed for profit and earnings that rob billions of human beings or should it be based upon that part of humanity that toils yet does not need competition but worldwide cooperation? It is the ineluctable crux of the matter: to enable the workers to conduct their fight against the war and against the capitalist offensive drive, not only must we engage in a worldwide struggle, but we must, also, be able to do more than just denounce the evil effects of the system: we must reach down to its roots. We must organize an antagonistic global outlook against the reality of the market with its ever more devastating crises and wars. We must break from capitalism in order to create a society that heeds the needs of mankind—that is, communism. This is the lesson we are learning from the revolt in Argentina: to block the spiraling crisis and poverty, the workers must cut off the tentacles that reach out directly from the centers of finance and world politics. Well beyond all the efforts to undertake an impossible reform of the existing system, this situation calls for a necessarily diverse organization of society that cannot be restricted to national boundaries. Continuing this struggle means that the proletariat must, perforce, enter the battleground of political confrontation, which is the question of who wields power in society. Hence, the need to build an international class party that consistently conducts its battle against a system that overwhelms workers and all mankind with calamities and death. We pledge ourselves to this enterprise, to advance arm in arm with those who are already aware of its need, not turning a deaf ear to the call for mobilization but heeding it, and coherently following it to the end.