Defeat the imperialist war drive against North Korea!

United States/South Korea and their Allies:Hands Off North Korea! 

Down with UN sanctions! Defeat the imperialist war drive against North Korea! 

Obama at the DMZ prior to the March 2012 Seoul Summit, where he warned North Korea as part of US imperialist war drive in East Asia (Pool/Yonhap News via Bloomberg)

In the first week of April the United States along with South Korea and its other allies continued its escalation against the North Korean (DPRK) bureaucratically deformed workers state (DWS), one of the historic gains for the international working class in the aftermath of World War II. South Korea on April 5th deployed two Aegis destroyers to monitor North Korea, while 2500 US marines have deployed to Australia and there has been a military buildup in Guam as well. Under the pretext of the DPRK developing a nuclear weapons capability, the United States, the only nation to ever use nuclear weapons in a war, is going after the North Korean regime to promote its imperialist interests in the region. This is scare-mongering by the Obama administration to rally support for their adventures, much like the “Weapons of Mass Destruction” claim used by the Bush administration to wage war on Iraq. The DPRK has no capacity to hit the USA with long range missiles or any nuclear payload.*

North Korea possesses zero nuclear warheads! No reports that can be independently verified estimate any North Korean delivery systems capability in the next five years. Meanwhile, the US, which has about 8,000 nuclear warheads ready for use, also has ABM missiles deployed in Alaska and Guam. ABM’s are not a defensive system but an offensive system based on maintaining First Strike capability. It can hit missiles on their liftoff minutes before they reach the apex of trajectory. In an operational scenario the USA strikes first, and then Russia or China launch with their depleted reaction force, then the ABM can hit the depleted enemy reaction force. This is an offensive system aimed at China, not Korea, which is not a threat to the United States. Japan’s current Prime Minister Abe, who hails from a war criminal family, wants to rearm Japan with nuclear weapons. The five permanent members of this UN Security Council which imposed sanctions on North Korea: USA, Russia, China, France and Britain all possess nuclear weapons. The United Nations is a reactionary tool of the major powers to stamp approval on imperialist adventures. When they cannot agree, the individual powers do as they please in any case.

While undoubtedly United States would like to overthrow the North Korean deformed workers state, their larger aims in this whole affair are to assert U.S. imperialist authority in East Asia and the Pacific, primarily against the emerging imperialist power of China. As part of its inter-imperialist war drive against China, these actions by the US are really about encircling and spending China to death. This standoff is less about Korea and more about the struggle between emergent imperialist China and its attempt to control its own back yard and beyond and the dominant imperialist thug attempting to maintain hegemony. Conflict between United States, its Japanese ally, and China spell increased imperialist rivalry as Mother Jones reported in January, 2013 in an article entitled Will China-Japan-US Tensions Sink the Global Economy?:

“…a potential crisis of far greater magnitude, and potentially far more imminent than most of us imagine. China’s determination to assert control over disputed islands in the potentially energy-rich waters of the East and South China Seas, in the face of stiffening resistance from Japan and the Philippines along with greater regional assertiveness by the United States, spells trouble not just regionally, but potentially globally.”

For its part, while capitalist China would like to see the collectivized economy of the DPRK overthrown and capitalism restored, they certainly do not want it done by the United States, as that would place the United States strategically on their border. However, China doesn’t want to shed blood for North Korea or mess up their economic relationship with the Unites States at this time. China owns 54% of the US debt. After the nuclear test in February, the United Nations imposed a new round of sanctions against the DPRK, and Beijing helped create these. The economic sanctions have created conditions of starvation, much like the UN sanctions against Iraq led to the deaths of an estimated 1 million Iraqis from disease and hunger. Embargos themselves are an act of war and lead to actual shooting wars.

The Korean and Chinese people paid dearly for their revolutions. Their post war revolutionary opposition to US imperialism, which sought to replace Japanese colonialism with American hegemony, collided with criminal US provocations resulting in a Korean War that left 4 million Koreans and 1 million Chinese dead. The working class must place the blame for the misery of the Korean people squarely on the back of imperialism. And we warn the masses that today the Chinese Stalinists are unwilling to provide the backbone of support for the beleaguered DWS, which is now bristling with false bravado in the face of imperialist war exercises within binocular range. For the Chinese Communist Party a slow restoration of capitalism and the integration and transformation of the DPRK into a semi-colony was on the agenda. They do not care one wit to defend the workers’ property that remains in Korea, in fact they have eyes on it, but they will not tolerate capitalist reintegration directed from the south which leaves the US military on the Yalu River.

US Provocations Against North Korea

The Wall Street Journal and CNN revealed on April 4th that the Obama administration had created “the playbook,” a step-by-step saber-rattling plan that the Pentagon was following. This included deployments to South Korea of nuclear capable B-52 bombers, B-2 bombers, and F-22 Raptor fighters in March. This plan was concocted months ago as the brainstorm of former defense secretary Leon Panetta and approved by current defense secretary Chuck Hagel. The US commander of the Strategic Air Command during both the Korean War and the early Vietnam War years, Curtis Lemay, said he would not leave one brick standing on top of another brick in North Korea…and he did that with a massive bombing campaign. More bombs were dropped by the US on North Korea during the three years of the Korean War, 1950-53, than in all of World War II. No wonder North Korea is a little miffed when the United States flies B52’s and B2′s over the region.

All this has echoes of the Cuban Missile Crisis when Kennedy brought the world to the brink of a nuclear war in his drive to destroy the Cuban Revolution. And Obama has proven himself as reckless as “the bombing starts in five minutes” Reagan, an outburst in the Cold War aimed against the Soviet degenerated workers state. In a series of deliberate provocations, the United States has engaged in a risky series of actions that apparently they are having second thoughts about now. Amid concerns that the US provocations “could lead to miscalculations” by North Korea, unnamed American officials have stated that Washington was now stepping back. That miscalculation could include considering the 1.1 million strong active DPRK army, their 180,000 special operations forces and their 8 million reservists. The United States may have the technological superiority, but it would be a bloody war.

US Imperialists are the Real Threat

The imperialist butchers of the United States have a lot of gall condemning North Korea for wanting weapons to defend themselves. After destroying North Korea’s 78 cities and thousands of her villages, and killing countless numbers of her civilians, US General Lemay remarked, “Over a period of three years or so we killed off – what – twenty percent of the population.” This amounted to an estimated 4 million Korean civilians killed. North Korea actually lost close to thirty percent of its population as a result of US-led bombings in the 1950s, while the United States military and their South Korean allies committed atrocities against civilians, like the now well-known No Gun Ri massacre of men, women and children. These war crimes were continued into the next decade in Vietnam, through executions, napalming, and the burning of Vietnamese villages and the carpet-bombing of North Vietnamese cities. My Lai has become synonymous with 20th Century imperialist war crimes. The US ruling class’ criminal actions continued into the 21st Century with their butchery in Afghanistan and Iraq, as documented by Wikileaks. PFC Bradley Manning is being made a scapegoat for these leaks. We demand his freedom.

In World War II, the United States used nuclear weapons for the only time in history, not once, but twice, murdering hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians. This followed the campaign of fire-bombing (that also took place in Europe), which were just as devastating. The atomic bombing of Japan served no real military purpose and was primarily a warning to the bureaucratically degenerated workers state of the Soviet Union whose Red Army had moved into Northeast China, Korea and Manchuria, liberating it from Japanese oppression. As Admiral William D. Leahy, President Truman’s Chief of Staff–and the top official who presided over meetings of both the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Combined U.S.-U.K. Chiefs of Staff, stated:

“[T]he use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender. . . . “

For International Working Class Defense of North Korea Against All Imperialists!
For Workers Political Revolution in North Korea!
For Socialist Revolution from China to South Korea to Japan!

The international working class has a real interest in defending the collectivized property of the DPRK against the imperialist powers, despite the bureaucratic Stalinist leadership. This is especially true for the American, South Korean, Japanese and Chinese working class. The Obama administration that is threatening the DPRK is also deploying the Coast Guard as scab-herders to break the West Coast ILWU struggle. The international working class is under all-out attack by capital on every continent. Just as workers would defend the trade unions or a labor strike against the capitalist state and the bosses, despite any bureaucratic leaderships, so should they defend the North Korean workers state without giving one ounce of political support to the North Korean Stalinist regime. Rising to the defense of our working class sisters and brothers of North Korea and the working class gains (collectivized property, planned economy, state monopoly of foreign trade) of the deformed North Korean workers state requires not only rallies and demonstrations, but above all labor actions organized on an international basis. These actions would include labor boycotts, hot-cargoing of military goods, particularly by port and transport workers, as well as labor political strikes against “our” ruling class’ war actions. The main enemy is at home! Just as with the heroic victory of the Vietnamese masses against US imperialism, a defeat for US imperialism in East Asia today would help to curb American military ambitions and be a victory for the working class and all the oppressed of the world.
Workers need to call for and try to organize rank-and-file soldiers and sailors committees in the US, South Korean and other imperialist armies that would arrest the officers and cease any conflict, fraternizing with their working class brothers and sisters across the front lines. Workers need to organize revolutionary workers parties in their own countries to organize against their own ruling class and abolish this system of exploitation that breeds poverty, racism and war.

For the working class there is only one way out and that is internationalist to the core. To defend the gains in social production and distribution achieved in the Korean DWS the parasitic bureaucracy must be defeated. Yet the North Korean workers cannot do this alone, as the military actions of imperialism will increase tenfold to stop a working class upsurge in the north. To win the political revolution in the north must link with the workers in the south and complete the expropriation of the bourgeoisie on the Korean peninsula and drive out imperialist forces. This scenario is feared as much by the CCP as it is by the South Korean bourgeoisie, Japanese and American imperialists. All these forces are arrayed against the North Korean workers, whose destiny depends on the ability of the Chinese and American workers to join hands across the pacific vowing to defeat their own imperialist bourgeoisie and turning the war drive toward WWIII into the socialist revolution. We call on all workers organizations in the USA, JAPAN and CHINA to commence labor actions against the bosses’ war drive. We know that when they kill us in our millions their stock portfolios swell. We know the North Korean and Chinese workers are not our enemies. Our enemies are the big capitalists driving the nation-states toward war.

As Murray Weiss, a spokesman for the Trotskyist majority led by James P. Cannon (Founder of American Trotskyism,) wrote in answer to the “Third Camp” minority:

“[I]t was this slight misconception as to who was the main enemy that helped to bury the German revolution. “For the Marxists, the main enemy of the Russian working class, as well as the international working class, is the class enemy…. The Bolshevik-Leninists in the U.S.S.R. will be the best fighters and because of that they will tell the Russian workers the truth: In order to win this war against imperialism we must overthrow the traitor Stalin and appeal to the revolutionary working class of the world to come to our aid.”(our emphasis) ("Marxist Criteria and the Character of the War,” [SWP] Internal Bulletin, February 1940”)

As capitalism everywhere continues to reel from its systemic crisis, it is ever more vital that the international working class organize struggle against this system of exploitation and war, before the imperialist madmen embroil the world in another major, possibly nuclear, war. We must stop any war escalating into a 3rd World War that will destroy the working class as well as civilization.

*DPRK’s “State of War” Declaration Is a Faulty Translation: Not an Official Policy Statement from Kim Jung Un, says Global Research.

Sources
Mother Jones: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/01/china-japan-us-military-tensions-are-powder-keg
Global Issues: http://www.globalissues.org/article/105/effects-of-sanctions
Global Research: http://www.globalresearch.ca/know-the-facts-north-korea-lost-close-to-30-of-its-population-as-a-result-of-us-bombings-in-the-1950s/22131
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Gun_Ri_Massacre
http://www.colorado.edu/AmStudies/lewis/2010/atomicdec.htm
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/korean_war.htm
http://www.globalfirepower.com/country-military-strength-detail.asp?country_id=North-Korea
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korean_Special_Operation_Force
http://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/asia/defend-north-korea/


Liaison Committee of Communists 7 April, 2013

Peru: Solidarity of JRCL (RMF) with campaign to free jailed miners

Denounce the brutal offensive to destroy Peruvian miners’ unions by the Garcia government!

In early September, the general secretary of the workers’ union of the Casapalca mine was caught by the police without warning. Two other leaders were also put in jail. They are accused of ‘the death of a police captain’ that happened in October last year. This accusation is, however, totally absurd and unjust.

The Casapalca mineworkers’ union has been waging the most militant fight among the Peruvian miners’ unions. The arrests of the three leaders are nothing but a brutal political repression that is designed to destroy their union. Workers of the Casapalca mine have continued their dauntless fight on the basis of their union. Despite the fact that most of them are temporary workers employed by different subcontractors, they have united together by strengthening their union. This is why Garcia’s government attacked their union. With this attack as a start, he intends to launch an offensive to eradicate the whole mineworkers’ movement. Acutely aware of this intention, the national federation of Peruvian miners’ unions rose in a 48-hour strike this October to fight back against the offensive.

Today, among South American countries, Peru is the most servile to US imperialism next to Colombia. The first thing that Alan Garcia did after his inauguration was the enforcement of the free trade agreement with the United States.

This country is noted for its rich mineral resources including silver, zinc, copper, tin and gold. Most of these minerals are produced, however, under the management of multinationals based in the US, Canada, Australia, Switzerland and other European countries. (Japanese monopolies including Mitsui, Mitsubishi and Sumitomo have invested their capital.) This is the result of the free economic policy that was taken by Alberto Fujimori during his presidency in 1990s. Moreover, Chinese companies are making inroads into this country today with the Shougang Group in the lead.

The Garcia government, together with the Peruvian bourgeoisie, have pursued their own interests by expanding the development and export of mineral resources through the invitation of US, European monopolies and Chinese companies. This has, of course, enabled these foreign companies to enjoy the limitless plunder of natural resources and, on the other, caused severer poverty to workers and peasants in this country.

Peruvian rulers know well that mineworkers will lead the toiling masses in their struggle against the cruel exploitation and the plunder of resources by foreign companies and eventually expel the president as servant of US imperialism. This is why Peruvian rulers have launched an offensive to destroy the mineworkers’ unions.

This attack is, however, stirring up another anger of the masses. And the anger is expanding like tidal waves beyond the Peruvian border.

Unite across borders to fight back!

From Bolivia, an ardent statement of solidarity has been issued by the Federación Sindical de Trabajadores Mineros de Borivia [FSTMB], which has the 60-year old history of vigorous struggle and has been always in the forefront of the class struggle. In its statement, the FSTMB calls on workers all over the world to fight for the release of the Peruvian miners.

Comrades of the FLTI have also stood up in protest on the initiative of its Peruvian affiliate, Liga Trotskista Internacionalista [LTI]. They call for international actions to press the Peruvian government to unconditionally free the jailed leaders of the union together with militant workers and peasants of Amazonia.

In response to these calls, various organizations are joining the campaign one after another. They include Zanon, Brukman and other industrial workers of Argentina, Himalaya mine workers of Bolivia, the Santiago federation of university students together with education workers of Chile.

Comrades!

In response to the call from the Bolivian mineworkers’ union, stand up together with comrades of the FLTI. Let us express our solidarity with Peruvian mineworkers! Immediately free our brothers of the Casapalca mine! Fight back against Garcia’s repression of workers and peasants!

Japanese monopoly capitalists are tormenting workers in Japan with massive sackings and lower wages, driving them into poverty and unemployment more ruthlessly than ever. Moreover, in a desperate bid to wriggle out of the economic crisis, Japanese imperialists are bent on intensifying their neo-colonialist inroads into not only Asian countries but also Latin America — in a fret because China is outstripping them. We must never let them do it. We are determined to fight in solidarity with Peruvian mineworkers, and with all working people in Latin America, who are struggling to break the cruel exploitation and expropriation by monopoly capitalist corporations of the US, Japanese and other imperialist countries and by greedy companies of China, which is intensifying its attempts to capture natural resources worldwide with an ambition to become a ‘superpower of the 21st century’.

In order to break the offensives to impose poverty upon the toiling masses, let us strengthen our unity with comrades who are fighting all over the world!

(Excerpted from weekly Kaihoh No. 2095)

FLTI Message to 47th Antiwar Assembly, Japan

July 31th, 2009

To the 47th International Assembly against the war

To the comrades of the Independent Federation of Student Associations of Japan (Zengakuren)

To the comrades of the Youth Committee against the war

To the comrades of the Revolutionary Communist League of Japan, Revolutionary Marxist Fraction

Comrades!

We present our most fervent revolutionary internationalist greeting to the Assembly. The message that we bring here was voted as a resolution of the Founding Congress of our organization –International Leninist Trotskyists Fraction (FLTI: Fracción Leninista Trotskista Internacional)-; and signed by all its members below.

Our congress voted to answer your call and participate in the Assembly organised behind the rallying cry of: Unite across borders and rise up in struggles against war and poverty on the basis of proletarian internationalism!

Today we are approaching the commemoration of the anniversary of 6th August 1945, when US imperialism dropped two nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killing over 300,000 workers, elderly, women and children. This genocidal attack has three objectives; first to ensure that the US was the outright victor of the Second Imperialist World War and the dominant imperialist power; second, to make the Stalinist bureaucracy of Moscow subordinate itself to Roosevelt, Truman and Churchill; and third, to smash the insurgent Japanese proletariat that was threatening to overthrow the Emperor and the Japanese imperialist bourgeoisie defeated in the war and open the road to the victorious proletarian revolution.

That is how US “democratic” imperialism –as Stalinism called it to tie the hands of the workers in a popular front with this faction of imperialism – won the war and claimed the resources and zones of influence of Germany and Japan. This lesson proved that “democratic” or “fascist” imperialism are not essentially different. Imperialist powers use both fascism and democracy as the need arises to further their interest in competing for zones of influence and to defeat the resistance of the workers and oppressed people. Thus, the “democratic” US imperialism bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki using nuclear weapons while the German “fascists” massacred more than 20 millions of Soviet workers and peasants; which was the price that the USSR paid to stop the German occupation of its territory.

64 years after the butchery of the WW2 we now see that the enemy imperialist powers of that time have formed now blocs according to their interests today. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki turned the Japanese imperialists –who killed millions in Asia and South East Asia fighting the US for its Pacific territories - into allies of the US, supporting and funding its military adventures today. This proves that capital has no borders since “business is business”. So imperialist Japan, with the second largest GDP in the world, is now the partner of US imperialism in controlling the Pacific with 135 US military bases and 54.000 soldiers based in Japan including Okinawa. Thus there is no disarmament for Japanese imperialism because it is under the nuclear protection of its US imperialist partnership. It shares in the superprofits of the Pacific and provides troops for the imperialist occupations and wars for oil.

From 1989 on, US imperialism, with its imperialist allies, finally achieved its objective in WW2. What Hitler could not do with his tanks, US imperialism backed by Japan, Germany and France, IMF loans and access to the world market, could do, transforming the Stalinist bureaucracy into its direct agent as a new restorationist bourgeois class in the workers states. The new Stalinist ruling class, in partnership with Citibank, Bank of Japan and Bundesbank, shared out Russia, China, and the East European former workers states transforming them into a giant site for imperialist maquiladoras. Russian gas and oil is controlled by the German BASF including the pipelines from Turkey and the Black Sea so that Europe is guaranteed a supply of gas and oil. China under the “red mandarins” has put millions of Chinese workers in concentration camps, in factories, the jails of the transnationals and the new counterrevolutionary Chinese bourgeoisie.

The former deformed Eastern workers states have been turned into the backyard of Europe, and Germany is in a fierce dispute with the US over the oil and gas resources of Russia and of the former Soviet Muslim republics of the USSR and Caucasus. These disputes have led to wars such as the bombings of NATO in the Balkans, the Russian genocides in Chechnya and the counterrevolutionary defeat of the Chinese workers and youth vanguard in Tiananmen Square. The latter allowed the parasitic “communist businessmen” of China, alongside the Japanese and US finance capital to super-exploit the proletariat to an extent that Hitler could not even have dreamed of in the zones occupied by the Nazi army.

Unite with the super-exploited Chinese workers and poor peasants!

We propose to together make a tribute in solidarity with the heroic Chinese working class martyrs. Today, under the shape of revolts in the cities and countryside, the Chinese working class faces factory closures, theft of land, massive layoffs, and the murderous repression by the new “red businessmen” of the CPC, enemy of the working class. Let’s unite with the Chinese working class which along with the black slaves in the 19^th century built the modern capitalist structure in USA, Europe and the rest of the imperialst world with its own blood and bones. Today, in the stage of capitalism’s rotten decadence, undergoing its death agony, they are no less exploited, repressed and killed.

Get out of China all the transnationals and the finance capital of Japan, USA, Germany, France and Europe!

Down with the murderous government of Hi Jintao and the new mandarins of red companies of Beijing!

Down with the army and the officer caste of the new Kuomintang, killer of Chinese workers and peasants!

Workers and Peasants of China betrayed by Stalinism to world capitalism, stand up again!

For committees of Workers and Poor and landless Peasants to expropriate the factories and land from the transnationals of international finance capital and the Chinese bourgeoisie!

Stop the massacre of the army of the murderous red Mandarins!

For the destruction of the caste of military officers!

For Soldiers committees that put their weapons in the service of the struggle to overthrow the bourgeoisie and return to the proletarian dictatorship under the leadership of the revolutionary party!

After the Second World War, the US victor was faced with a revolutionary war in Korea. It defeated the Korean workers dividing Korea at the 38º parallel only through the betrayals of the Stalinist, Maoist and Ki-Mihn-Jung bureaucracy. South Korea, supported by Japanese imperialism allied to US imperialism, is a military base, like that of Hong Kong, protecting the interests of imperialism in the Asian Pacific region. They are the bases that will be used to invade and occupy China to divide it again as the imperialist powers did in the 20^th century.

The Japanese proletariat has an historical responsibility towards its class brothers and sisters of China, Korea, Asia and the Pacific. You comrades are members of the working class in Imperialist Japan which participated in the great historical defeats of the Asian proletariat in Korea and China along with the US defeat in Vietnam. You were also witnesses to the history of the greatest betrayals of Stalinism of the world proletarian revolution. They sold out Vietnam, China and now North Korea to the capitalist restoration. They stopped the mass offensive at the 38º parallel in Korea. They sold the living flesh of the majority of the working class in China and Asia for imperialist super-exploitation.

Today, the Japanese proletariat must look for itself in the mirror of its class brothers and sisters of China and Korea. If they are defeated the Japanese proletariat will be defeated also. Let’s stand together in Tokyo and all Japan and demand:

Out with the Yankee bases from Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea!

For the military defeat of US and Japanese imperialist troops in Asia, Iraq, Afghanistan and in the entire Middle East!

Down with the governments of the new bourgeoisies born out of Stalinism in China and North Korea!

The third Chinese revolution must stand up again for bread and land!

For the expulsion of all the imperialists beyond the 38º parallel and the whole Korean peninsula!

For united workers and socialist Korea!

For a new Vietnam! Kick out the transnationals from Vietnam and Asia!

But this time the Japanese proletariat –breaking with its own imperialist bourgeoisie- must lead this combat in Tokyo.

For a Japan where its working class links its fate to that of the Pacific working class!

One class, one struggle from Korea to Japan, from China to Vietnam!

As Marx would say, no people that oppress another people can be free. The Japanese working class must stand up with one single demand:

For equal work and equal wage in China and Japan!

Kick out the Japanese maquilas that starve the Chinese working class!

No recognition of Japanese debts and investments in China!

That is how the Japanese proletariat will win great allies -the millions of Chinese workers and peasants- to triumph in its own country! These are the forces needed to re-open the road to a revolutionary workers soviet in Japan, for which the workers at the end of the Second World War died, a struggle that was then defeated by the betrayal of Stalinism!

Comrades; imperialism is the epoch of capitalist decay. It becomes more and more parasitic, destroying the productive forces, developing destructive forces, and buying a sector of the working class, i.e. union bureaucracy and labor aristocracy; their parties and trade unions, as the jail keepers of the entire workers movement.

Two years ago the world economic crisis began. This new crisis and bankruptcy of the world capitalist system proves that capitalism was not able to find way out of the 68-74 crisis by reclaiming (after 1989) the new markets of the former workers states as fresh blood. By 2001 the effects of this blood transfusion were exhausted, and capitalism managed to survive for a few more years until the overproduction crisis of 2007 only by means of counterrevolutionary wars of occupation, in Iraq and Afghanistan and developing its destructive forces.

We in the ILTF state that this rotten system –which in crisis after crisis survives by becoming more parasitic – has already eaten the value of human labor that has yet to be produced. The US, European and Japanese banks have destroyed more than 14 trillion dollars. Today they are trying to make the exploited masses of the world –mainly the world working class - pay for the costs of the crisis.

The states have bought the “toxic assets”, i.e. the losses of international finance capital. Over 4 trillion dollars were paid to US banks and companies by the US state to cover their deficit. Similar amounts have been paid to save the German, French and Japanese banks. States have kept the debts and “toxic assets”, to subsidise these losses so the exploited of the world pay for them –particularly the working class- while they save the profits of the capitalists.

Over 12 trillion dollars have been paid to cover the losses of finance capital in the US, which because of its global dominance forces the rest of imperialist powers and exploited masses pay for its crisis.

The US put 1.7 trillions dollars into Eastern Europe to cover the defaults and since it now controls Poland, the US is threatening Germany in its own backyard. While Germany is the No 1 exporter of the world, it is already in recession –together with the entire Europe-, threatened by an open depression. States have assets with no value and the masses will pay for them with inflation and a devalued currency, opening the perspective of a stagflation process. This will definitely create new defaults -as it has happened in the Eastern Europe countries- in all oppressed nations of the semi-colonial world.

Japanese imperialism is on the brink of ruin, after the lost decade of the `90s. During those years Japan was dislocated from the world division of labor set uip at Yalta as an exporter and main supplier of microchips and technology or the US industrial military apparatus. If Japanese imperialism was able to emerge from 10 years of crisis it was due to its investments in China. Japan was one of the main supplier of machines, tools and credit (relatively cheap) for the transnationals factories built in China, plundering that country, exploiting the low wages. Japan restored its growth rate with the superprofits made in China. That is what allowed it to raise its head in the first five years of the 21st century. But the current world capitalist crisis had again brought Japan to the brink of bankruptcy. The Japanese working class is paying for that crisis with mass dismissals, wage cuts, like all the workers of the world.

In this crisis there is a renewed competition among the imperialist powers to divide China and Russia like the Balkans in ‘89 and ‘90, or when China was occupied by Japan and England in the mid 20^th century. If the proletariat - subordinated by treacherous leaderships- doesn’t solve the crisis in its interests, then imperialism and bourgeoisie will solve it in their interests. They will solve their crisis by driving the rate of super-exploitation of the semi-colonial countries and of their own workers in the scramble for control of branches of production and zones of influence and access to raw materials. This will not be peacefull. As Lenin and Third International said: the most important economic factor is the war; it is only by war that ultimately finance capital can restore its profit rate.

Comrades, the price of capitalism's bankruptcy is paid for by the masses. According to the FAO, –and it is not an invention of any crazy ultra –leftist but the UN itself - 1 billion people have stopped eating every day in the world and another billion have lost their jobs.

Immigrant workers that have been used to do the worst jobs and hold down labor costs arte today being deported in their millions from the imperialist countries. Hundreds of thousands of black workers are being deported from Europe and many of them die in the Mediterranean Sea. Hundreds of thousands of Latin American immigrants in USA are also being expelled or jailed. Not only that, US, German, Japanese etc workers who have had legal protections or welfare provisions are now facing the same kind of conditions found in the semi-colonial countries. More than 40 million US workers live on the charity of the state without health insurance or pensions. The same happens in Japan, Germany, France and in the entire imperialist Europe. This is just the beginning.

In this assembly against the war, the FLTI Trotskyists want to affirm that the working class and the oppressed people of the world have put up a fight against the capitalist counterrevolutionary offensives. They did in 2001 with the Latin American proletariat in revolutionary uprisings in Argentina, Bolivia or Ecuador. The imperialist oil wars and the Israeli attacks Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq met reat mass resistance like that in Fallujah, Mazar I Shariff, the Palestinians and Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon defeated the Zionist army of Israel. These resistance movements in turn sparked the beginning of a working class antiwar movement in the USA forcing the US ruling class to for the first time replace the rich white Texan Bush with a young, black faced President to restore the legitimacy of the Bi-partisan Republicrat regime.

In 2007, when this crisis started, the working class said we are here. We start to fight in Greece and our cry was “in Athens we make the spark and the fire burns Paris”. In Madagascar, Martinique, Guadalupe and the Antilles we went into combat for our wages against French colonialism and imperialism. In Paris, the youth of the immigrant workers din 2005 shouted “every night we make a Bagdad in Paris”, and we set up the pickets against the war in Oakland on the US west coast banning the shipment of murderous US war machinery; in Paris we start occupying the factories with the bosses as hostages declaring that the ones who had to pay for the crisis as those who made it and not the workers.

Comrades, we call on the Assembly to salute together the fighters of the Greek barricades, the ones who fought and died in Fallujah and Mazar i Shariff, the heroic fighters of the Palestine resistance, the militant youth of Paris, the workers occupying the factories in France, the dock workers of the US, the strikers that confronted French imperialism in Martinique and Guadalupe, and those who started the revolution in Madagascar, they are the vanguard of the masses counteroffensive that we have to win to make the exploiters and expropriators of the world pay for their crisis.

There is no lack of courage or willingness on the part of the exploited masses to enter the fight. But there are too many treacherous leaders who betray step by step the exploited masses’ struggles.

Facing the masses resistance to the world crisis, facing the prospect of a Vietnam scenario, as the black bags of dead US soldiers coming from Iraq and Afghanistan and the growing opposition of the US masses to the war, and facing the rise of a militant immigrant workers' struggle, the imperialist killers have put on their Obama disguise. They think that the face of Obama can hide the rule of the monopolies and finance capital that threw Afghanistan back to the dark ages in the war of civilization against barbarism, and killed over a million Iraqis in 3 invasions since 1991. They try now, dressed as a the good guy, “offering the hand " of peace and democracy to maintain US hegemony. In particular, they want to divert the upsurge of the US masses against the war and the hated Bush’s government. The US ally, Japan, tries to do the same with the election of the Democrat Party supported by the Communist Party to divert the hatred of the Japanese workers and masses to 50 years of the rule of the Liberal-Democratic Party.

In order to resolve the crisis in its interests the capitalist system needs to use its paid agents to contain the workers' resistance. For this purpose it has recruited all the treacherous leaders emerging out of the labor aristocracy around the world to obey one command: "The working class must pay for the crisis. Defend and bosses' governments in crisis from the hate of the exploited. Impose, new agreements and pacts to strangle the workers' resistance to defeat them in counter-revolutionary class wars.”

Thus, with counter-revolutionary pacts between the popular front and fascism the heroic Bolivian revolution has been strangled. These pacts are reinforced by semi-fascistic governments, like Uribe in Colombia, and military coups like that in Honduras. Signed with the blood of the Palestinian resistance, they want new pacts to seal the fate of the masses in the concentration camps and in Ghettos and guarantee the genocidal state of Israel. T

In Iraq, where the heroic Shiite masses in the South make the Iraqi protectorate army run away, the Ayatollahs of Iran and Basora contain them and disarm them to protect Maliki’s government. Meanwhile, the Turkish army invades the north of the country. So, while the Bolivarian bourgeoisie –supported by the Stalinists, social democrats and renegades of Trotskyism- have expropriated the Latin American revolution and put the left of the US working class at Obama’s feet, the “Islamic” and “bazaar” bourgeoisie in the Middle East have used the heroic revolutionary fight of the masses to haggle over their share of the profits as the junior partners of the imperialism.

Comrades, let’s condemn the bourgeoisie of Al Fatah -and now Hamas- who with the blood of the martyred Palestinian masses, sign agreements for the existence of two states, and thus recognise the right to exist of the genocidal state of Israel! Let’s oppose the pacts of the bourgeois leadership of Hezbollah with the pro-imperialist government of Siniora, which after the masses defeated the Zionist state in southern Lebanon allowed the entry of the UN imperialist troops. The masses gave their blood and now the bourgeoisie makes profits out of rebuilding Southern Lebanon, leaving the Palestinian masses isolated in the ghettos of Gaza and the West Bank, surrounded by the hated wall.

We can’t allow this! Down with the collaborationist bourgeoisie that in the negotiation it gives away the fight of the heroic Palestinian masses! For a Palestinian national assembly of Gaza, West Bank, Lebanon and Jordan that unifies, under the leadership of the workers and peasants, the fight for destroying the Zionist- fascist state of Israel and conquer a national leadership, so the free secular democratic Palestine, under a peasants and workers government will be the advanced point for the revolution in the whole Middle East!

In Egypt and Iran, since 2007, a great struggle of the working class has started. The Ayatollahs and the Islamic bourgeoisies –terrified by the Iranian working class uprising- have launched the fiercest repression against the workers of their countries who only demand bread and work in the face of rampant unemployment and starvation.

Ayatollahs’ regime represses its working class in Iran and guarantees the subordination of the Shiite masses in southern Iraq to stabilize the puppet government. The notorious regime of the Ayatollahs smashed the true revolution of the workers, soldiers and revolutionary students committees that defeated the Shah Reza Pah Levi in 1979.

Defeat the US and Japanese invaders in Iraq and in Afghanistan!

For the return of the Iranian revolution of 1979!

For the return of the Shoras, the workers and soldiers committees! T

Masses in Gaza break down the hated wall of and unite with your class brothers and sisters in Egypt!

US and Japanese out of Iraq and Afghanistan!

French and German imperialism out of Iran, Egypt and the Middle East!

The fight for national liberation and against colonial oppression will only succeed with the expropriation of all the imperialist companies and those of their servants the national bourgeoisies, and opening the road to a Federation of Soviet Workers and Peasants Republics in all the Middle East.

But, for preventing the opening of these revolutionary perspectives of the exploited, for preventing the spark in Athens from setting Paris or Tokyo on fire and for the fires of Madagascar not to reach Zimbabwe, Congo or South Africa; from all the transnationals and the finance capital of all the imperialist powers came the command: "The working class must accept the suspensions, dismissals and loss of their pensions, health insurance, cuts in working hours and wages."

In all the countries of the world, this command is obeyed by all the union bureaucracies and the reformist parties of the Labor aristocracy, including the AFL-CIO, the reformist European unions, the Bolivarian and the so-called "Islamic" bourgeoisies, the social-democrats and the recycled Stalinists and the renegades of Trotskyism: the working class must give away its gains, and even its jobs and wages in order to keep alive this horrible system over the ruin of the exploited. We can’t allow this!

Comrades, we’ve traveled 30,000 kilometres to be at the Assembly. We came here to bring four proposals, because we’ve come here to fight together. We are aware of the differences we have, but we also know that we recognize each other as fighters of the world working class.

We have four proposals:

All the treacherous leaders have been recruited to act as scabs of the struggles of the international working class to make us give away our jobs and our historic gains to save a bunch of parasites that has taken mankind at the edge of the barbarism and disaster. We can’t allow this!

They want us to give up our heroic struggles against the war and the exploiters; calling on us to support the 'democratic' executioners like Obama and the Bolivarian Bourgeoisies, the popular fronts, and the Islamic bourgeoisies that sell out our liberation wars and our national struggles. We can’t allow this either!

That is why we propose:

1) Against that real “sliding scale of suspensions and dismissals” that the labor aristocracy and bureaucracy of the whole world want to impose on us, we must counter-pose our war cry:

Capitalists pay for the crisis!

For the sliding scale of wages and hours of labor!

All the available hands to work!

Factories and machines have been stopped and destroyed because they are unprofitable.

It is time for those to go to the hands of the producers, the working class!

Expropriation without compensation and under workers’ control of all factories that close or dismiss!

No more money to the banks and capitalists!

Expropriation without compensation of the super-banks and financial oligarchy!

We must expropriate Wall Street, Bundesbank, Credit Lyonnaise; Fuji, Toyota and Sony –follow the example of the Paris workers who occupied their factories-!

No more loans of billions of dollars for the capitalist parasites!

Expropriation of General Motors in the whole world!

Down with the increase of the cost of living! There is 1 billion of starving people in the planet. The wages no longer allow the replenishment of daily labor power.

Immediate increase of wages for everybody!

Equal work, equal wage, for women, youth and immigrants in the whole working class of the world!

2) We take as ours the war cry of the founders of revolutionary Marxism in the imperialist epoch. Let’s cry with Karl Liebkneckt –the greatest fighter against imperialist wars-:

Water and fire cannot be mixed! There is nothing that the exploited masses can do together with their executioners to free themselves!

Down with the collaborationist bourgeoisies of Middle East!

Down with the pacts of the Iranian Ayatollahs that repress the heroic Iranian working class and support Al Maliki and the US protectorate government in Iraq!

Down with the pacts of the collaborationist bourgeoisies of the Middle East that support the Zionist fascist state of Israel; like Al Fatah or Hezbollah that gave away the masses of Southern Lebanon with the counterrevolutionary pacts with the pro-imperialist government of Siniora!

Down with the popular fronts that submit the Bolivian proletariat to its bourgeoisie and US-French imperialism! That pact made between Morales and the Media Luna –which smashed the workers and peasants in that country- blessed by the OAS.

Down with the Popular Front on the African National Congress, where Stalinism and the black bourgeoisie rule over the South African proletariat and poor peasants! I

Down with the popular front of class collaboration in Zimbabwe which has inflation of 1000%, 90% of unemployment and widespread famine in that country!

Down with the pacts that want to restore capitalism in Cuba led by the Castro brothers and Bomber Obama of the US Democratic Party!

Down with the pact between Stalinism and the democratic party of Japan that will be used to make an offensive against the Japanese proletariat, and together with USA- make offensives in Korea, China and in all Asia!

3) There has been a military coup in Honduras –US backyard - to make that country with its powerful US military base, to join with Colombia as the front line of US imperialism in its class wars to recover control of its backyard from its rivals, France, Germany and Japan.

The US Republicrats regime dresses up as Obama on one hand and on the other hand uses the iron fist of its military in Afghanistan, Pakistan and now in the Honduras coup.They anticipated the workers and peasants uprising that was coming and replaced the Bolivarian bourgeois fraction of Zelaya that was bargaining for a geater share of the banana business.

OAS, Latin American bourgeoisies, Obama and Republicrats hands off Honduras!

US military bases out of Honduras and Colombia and all of Latin America where they organise all the counterrevolutionary forces on the continent!

Down with the pact of Zelaya and the coupists, who sacrifice the blood of the owrkers to keep their profits and turn Honduras, Central America and Mexico turned into a great US maquila!

For workers and peasants militias to smash the coup, abolish the murderous officer caste and expropriate all the properties of the oligarchy, imperialism and the coupists!

In Central America: One fight, one revolution!

OAS gurkhas troops out of Haití!

French Imperialism and its mercenary troops out of Guadalupe and the Antilles!

US out of Guantanamo!

Down with the Castroite restorationist bureaucracy and its capitalist restoration pact with Obama!

For a true workers, peasants and revolutionary soldiers government that puts Cuba at the service of the Latin American revolution and world revolution!

For the socialist United States of Central and South America!

We call from the American continent to you, revolutionary youth and workers of Japan, to organize a demonstration in Okinawa against the US military base and to demand and fight for: US military bases out of Honduras, Colombia and Guantanamo! Smash the military coup in Honduras financed by the US and the Obama Republicrat regime!

4) Comrades as the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki approaches let us make a commitment with our revolutionary workers honor and tell the world working class that the betrayal of, first, social democracy and then Stalinism (in the mid of 20th century) opened the road to the two imperialist wars. Stalinism did it by betraying the German, Spanish and French revolutions in the ‘30s after it had betrayed the heroic Soviet Revolution in Russia of 1917.

Comrades; there is no doubt that if the proletarian revolution doesn’t stop it capitalism will survive not with peace but with new wars and even new holocausts and barbarism. The imperialist powers who risk losing their spheres of influence will not give up without a fight. They will try to defend them by going to war as they did already in two world wars in the imperialist epoch.

The Third world war will start like the second finished: with bombs like Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It will be preceded by what we have already seen in Africa, proxy wars between imperialist powers using different ethnic warlords and national bourgeois fractions. They use them to plunder minerals (as Coltan) or diamonds and precious stones. Those commodities are not hotly disputed by the US, French and Japanese imperialist gangs.

The revolutionary youth and workers of Japan, that today are gathering together in this assembly, must stand up with class hate against those massacres and genocides of our class brothers and sisters in Congo and Zimbabwe, which is the equal to 10 Hiroshimas and Nagasakis.

Comrades: to stop the holocaust and the use of nuclear weapons by imperialist powers, the road cannot be 'peace in general' as Stalinism used to proclaim during the Yalta and Posdam. period. The only Stalinist peace is in the cemeteries of dead workers caused by the Stalinist betrayals of many revolutions.

The proletariat has a missile more powerful than all imperialist nuclear arsenals. That missile is the socialist revolution in the imperialist countries. Stated clearly, revolutionary workers and students of Japan: there is only one way to stop the French, US or Russians (acting on behalf of Germany) and the Zionist state of Israel using nuclear weapons, and to prevent the arming of Japanese imperialism to defend its share of imperialist profits now under threat. That is to unify the workers ranks, prepare an international counteroffensive of the world proletariat to put on the agenda of the day, to make the exploiters and parasites of world financial capitals pay for their crisis by fighting for the socialist revolution in USA, France, Germany and Japan.

Yes comrades, the revolution and the fight of the working class in the imperialist countries will require building workers militias and splitting the army. to create soldiers militias. Workers manufacture the weapons, use them and transport them. The only thing that separates the workers from the armed insurrection are the reformist leaderships the agents of capitalism. None of the US, French, German bourgeoisie could use a nuclear bomb against a working class 'missile' of the armed workers in their own country.

We must tell the truth: the proletarian revolution in the imperialist countries is the only road to nuclear disarmament. The fight for the restoration of the proletarian dictatorship in the former USSR and China and the defeat of the red mandarins is also necessary for nuclear disarmament. To conquer peace and bread the only way is to expropriate the expropriators, and the proletarian revolution is the nuclear weapon of the exploited which will be armed when we overthrow the treacherous leadership.

The time has come for the world working class raise the demands of the world revolution.

Down with imperialism!

Down with pacifism!

For the socialist revolution in the USA!

For the socialist united states of North America! Down with the Fifth Republic of the French imperialist butchers, with the Spanish and British monarchies, and with the Bundesbank government in Germany!

Victory for the proletarian dictatorship! For the socialist united states in Europe!

For a workers soviet and revolutionary Japan on the road to the federation of socialist republics of Asia!

For that reason, we came here to make a final proposal to this assembly; a proposal which was already acted on by the revolutionary workers and youth in the Athens barricades, the workers and peasants in Madagascar, Martinique and Guadalupe and the ones that occupied the factories in France: “the spark in Athens, burns Paris”.

Let’s affirm together:

Burn down London and New York!

We want a Vietnam in the Middle East!

For the defeat of the imperialist invasion troops in the Middle East!

Break with Obama to rise up again the US working class!

Break with the leadership of the WSF, with the renegades of Trotskyism who put the North American masses at the feet of the US imperialist bombers of the Democratic Party, the ones that supported Bush and today continue their offensives all over the planet!

To pay a tribute to the struggle raised by the Greek masses, let’s make together a call to all the organizations that claim to speak on behalf of the working class to break with the bourgeoisie. Let’s call for the the mobilisation again of the Million Workers March against the war in USA. The world working class needs the Oakland workers stopping military supplies reaching the imperialist colonialist and oppression wars. To fight against the imperialist coups like that of Honduras and against the new counterrevolutionary offensives that the US, French and German imperialist bombers are preparing for bloodstained Africa.

You revolutionary comrades, workers and youth of Japan have the responsibility and the duty to make this call. The entire US left, including the Castroists, the renegades of Trotskyism , the friends of the Bolivarians, and Social Democrats, have conspired to prevent the great united workers front organised on May 1st every year in the US by the immigrant brothers and sisters against the oppressed imperialist war from becoming a general strike. In Japan the militant railway workers and metal workers, and the revolutionary students, have the authority to coordinate with their brothers and sisters from the US West Coast, to launch together the struggle to break with the bourgeoisie, the siren songs of the popular front and the class collaborationist policy which ties the hands of the workers, so that the iron fist of the fascist counterrevolution is prepared.

We propose that you make this call to the Oakland workers and the organizations of the Million Workers March against the war in USA to organise a great congress of the combative, revolutionary and anti-imperialist fighting workers’ organizations around the world. Make the capitalist pay for the crisis; expropriate the expropriators. Prepare the world masses counteroffensive to put on the agenda the International Socialist Revolution. It is time to regroup the fighting workers’ ranks!

It is an honour to fight with you. It is an honour to be here. Let’s act together. The international working class needs a new leadership to succeed, a general staff to fight against the exploiters and to open the road to victories and not that of defeats.

Victory for the International Socialist Revolution!

For the working class and the exploited to live, imperialism must die!

The liberation of the workers will be achieved by the workers themselves!

Down with the labour aristocracy and bureaucracy, the World Social Forum, Stalinism and the renegades of Trotskyism and all those who sell out the world proletarian combat!

For an International Conference of Principled Trotskyists and revolutionary workers organizations!

We have to break with imperialism disguised as Obama and break with all the national bourgeoisies and the treacherous leaderships who are their agents. The railway workers and the Japanese youth have the authority to make this call.

This is our war cry. Those are our proposals.

International Coordination Secretariat of the International Leninist Trotskyist Fraction, on behalf of:

Liga Obrera Internacionalista – Cuarta Internacional, of Argentina

Partido Obrero Internacionalista – Cuarta Internacional, of Chile

Liga Trotskista Internacionalista, of Bolivia

Fracción Trotskista, of Brazil

Liga Trotskista Internacionalista, of Peru

Communist Workers Group, of New Zealand