We extend our solidarity to your assembly, and your calls for proletarian internationalism and antiwar struggle based on it.

We agree with you that the continuing clash between the U.S. and China for capitalist-imperialist hegemony over the world is dangerous, as are the moves by U.S. imperialism to kindle a war with Iran. We agree with your opposition to the U.S.-Japan military alliance and their collusion to revise Japan’s Constitution.

The full development of proletarian internationalism depends on understanding that imperialism, militarism, and war moves are inherent features of capitalism, and that they are especially dangerous at this stage of world capitalism’s disintegration. Its crisis and disintegration are bringing forth new far-right, even fascist elements that now dominate national governments in a number of countries, from the U.S. to Brazil, from Hungary to the Philippines.

The full development of proletarian internationalism also depends on understanding how the failures of the Left have eased the advance of the far Right.

After the fall of “Communism” in Europe, instead of the advent of a new revolutionary socialist period, global politics of the rulers made a palpable turn toward nationalism and ethnocentrism. This turn of global politics was facilitated by the failure of the world Left to make a category of the opposite tendency coming from the masses in Bosnia and Herzegovina who were defending a multicultural existence. The same failure was repeated in the lack of solidarity with the revolution from below in Syria in the last eight years.

Unfortunately, much of the Left refuses to recognize their own share of responsibility for the counter-revolutionary descent since the Bosnian genocide. Establishing proletarian internationalism is blocked by the failure to establish a clear dividing line within the Left, to oppose that part of what claims to be Left but that has effectively allied itself with reactionary rulers like Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. News and Letters Committees devoted a section of our Perspectives for this year to analyzing this problem (“World Crises in Economy, Politics, Ideology—and the Missing Link of Philosophy”). We conclude that the full development of proletarian internationalism requires the projection of a philosophy of revolution as an element of the struggle:

“The present split within the Left calls for realizing philosophy as a polarizing force that gives action its direction. That direction would begin, but not end, with fighting for solidarity with real revolution and breaking with those who support counter-revolution. That is only the first step toward second negation and a direction driven by the concept of revolution in permanence….

“The point is to make a new philosophical beginning to set the ground for a new beginning in reality, in revolution, in the achievement of a new human society. The absence of that kind of ground sapped the Left’s power to project a pole of attraction for the discontent that is so widespread, and therefore its power to resist the rise of the Right. As we have seen, much of the Left’s thinking got warped by the ideological pollution from the Right.”

Comrades, let us struggle together to establish revolutionary solidarity in both thought and activity, to oppose and prevent war, to promote proletarian internationalism, to abolish capitalism, militarism, and imperialism, and to open a revolutionary path to a new, free, human society!

For freedom,
Franklin Dmitryev, National Organizer, for the Resident Editorial Board of News and Letters Committees
July 29, 2019