Canadian internationalists against the war

We have just received issue no. 2 of the Internationalist Notes bulletin in Canada. The comrades who have put out this bulletin describe themselves as "a small nucleus of left communist workers" who are seeking to clarify "the major elements of a left communist platform"t communist platform". In line with their commitment both to proletarian internationalism and their "struggle to join other forces of the communist left in view of building a new International for the promotion of world revolution", this bulletin contains the leaflets against the Balkans war put out by the ICC and the IBRP. We publish below IN's own statement on the war.

IN can be contacted c/o CP 266, Succ "C", Montreal, QC, Canada, H2L 4K1

The Balkan region is sinking hour by hour, day by day, into absolute horror. The infernal war machine has brutally reminded us of the true content of the "New World Order" proclaimed at the beginning of this decade. It's the order of murderers, gangsters, vultures: the order of a class of butchers.

One thing is sure, this conflict has nothing to do with so-called "international law" or humanitarian concerns. It has nothing to do with the defense of culture or of a few monasteries or mosques in Northern Kosovo. This war is not the product of any single leader or state that's more aggressive than the other. It's rather the reality of the aberrant laws and logic of the market - of global capitalism.

Three words can sum up what opposes Albanian and Serbian capitalists in northern Kosovo: coal, iron, and gold. One word fully characterises the humanitarian pretensions of the NATO bosses: Hypocrisy! The same propaganda machine that is shedding crocodicodile tears about the fate of the refugees and ethnic cleansing, pretends to ignore years of even more massive cleansing and massacres in Turkey, in Indonesia, and elsewhere; massacres that they finance and support more often than not.

What the NATO forces are doing in the Balkans is defending economic and strategic interests in the manner of a pack of wolves, each fighting with the other to grab the biggest chunk. War is a continuation of politics...The blood debt that humanity must pay because it still hasn't been able to get rid of this barbaric and obsolete system that is capitalism.

Faced with this unfurling of atrocities, workers' consciousness is still extremely low. The population of each bloc is drowned by a media barrage presenting the other's camp as ogres, fascists, blind terrorists. The intervention of the still weak revolutionary forces is crucial for an even modest development of a class perspective on these deadly events. The "official left" (socialists, pseudo-communists, greens, social democrats) have nothing to offer the working class if not bullets and blood. It's part and parcel of the majority of the governments leading the massacre! The leftist groups give the impression of struggling against the war! But on closer observation, behind the inflammatory rhetoric, there is invariably the defense of nationalist poison (not always the same), of a state or an imperialist camp. Most of the time, , it's in the name of a murky "right to self determination", unrealizable in this period of capitalist decadence. There is no progress possible in the framework of a greater Albania, or a greater Serbia, or an imperialist protectorate. The only possible way out of this escalating chain of war and massacres, of this "New World Order", is that the international working class massively occupies its own terrain, the terrain of the class struggle! It is the way that the workers put an end to the butchery of 1914. And there's no other way out...In this spirit we make it our duty to publish two documents from the two largest organizations of the communist left, the current of real internationalist communism. The two documents are dated March 25, 1999, but they keep at the moment of this writing all their relevance.

Down with the war!

Down with capitalism!

Workers of the world unite!

Internationalist Notes, Montreal April 16, 1999