February 25: 10,000 Protest in the Port of Genova Against Arms to Ukraine
Summer 2023: Mobilize Workers’ Power to Shut Down NATO Bases in Italy!

Italy: Workers Action Key to Defeating
Imperialist War Drive Against Russia, China

Fascist Meloni, Populists, Liberal “Democrats”: Warmongers, Strikebreakers All!

The following article is translated from the upcoming issue of L’internazionalista, published by the Nucleo Internazionalista d’Italia, section of the League for the Fourth International.

JUNE 27 – The imperialist war against Russia, ultimately aimed at restoring capitalist rule in China, continues to escalate. Last September, immediately after the electoral victory of her party, the fascist Fratelli d’Italia (Fd’I – Brothers of Italy), Giorgia Meloni tweeted to Vlodymyr Zelensky, president of the fascist-infested U.S./NATO proxy regime in Ukraine: “You know that you can count on our loyal support…. Stay strong and keep your faith steadfast!” She affirmed her loyalty to NATO and the European Union (EU), while calling for more sanctions against Russia, more arms for Ukraine, and denounced the incorporation (after a popular referendum) of the four Russian-speaking southeastern regions into Russia.

When the fascist puppet Ukrainian president visited the fascist Italian prime minister in the Palazzo Chigi in May, Meloni reiterated that her government would continue its military support to Kiev, declaring: “We are betting on Ukraine’s victory” (Deutsche Welle, 13 May). The previous “national unity” government under Eurobanker-premier Mario Draghi began supplying armaments to Ukraine last year. This has increased under the far-right Meloni government, which has reportedly sent dozens of surplus M109 self-propelled howitzers and most recently a modern SAMP/T anti-aircraft missile system. Unlike other NATO countries, Rome has been secretive about its shipments because of vocal popular opposition to arming Ukraine.

Every opinion poll shows that a majority of Italians are against sending arms to Ukraine, and that the NATO imperialist war and sanctions against Russia are unpopular. No matter, Meloni declares Italy will continuing arming Ukraine “regardless of the impact this may have on public opinion” (“L’opinione pubblica non ci interessa, Kiev va sostenuta” [We’re not interested in public opinion, Kiev will be supported], (Quotidiano di Sicilia, 22 March). Despite occasional barbs from her coalition partners, Putin fans Matteo Salvini (Lega) and the late Silvio Berlusconi (Forza Italia), the Rome government, both under cabinets of “national unity” and the far right, exhorts the masses to accept sacrifices for the cause of “liberty and democracy” in Ukraine.

The Meloni government’s involvement in the imperialist war goes hand in hand with vicious attacks against the working masses in Italy. Runaway inflation, largely caused by the imperialist sanctions and war, is hitting the middle class and working class hard, while homelessness and poverty increase. The “May Day Decree” enables employers to extend short-term work contracts to 24 months, sometimes 36 months, with no obligation to permanently hire at the end of this period, while axing the (utterly inadequate) “citizenship income” and introducing an even lower and harder-to-qualify-for “inclusion grant.” It reintroduces vouchers, which pay hour by hour. And with maximum job insecurity will come even more fatal work accidents (1,361 in 2021).

Today, older people are forced to work until age 67 (or even beyond if the number of years worked do not reach a ceiling) while there is massive youth unemployment. Since most jobs are precarious and low-paying, many young people go to live and work abroad. There are now more emigrants than immigrants and the total population is declining and aging because young people mostly can’t afford to have a family. Many women are fired or lose their job when they are pregnant or because childcare is too expensive or insufficient. Desperate to raise the birth rate, the government is pushing to severely restrict or eliminate the limited (first trimester) right to abortion which women have had under Law 194 since 1978. (Meloni vowed in the campaign to give women “the right to not have an abortion.”)

Meanwhile, COVID continues to kill dozens a day while spending for health care, education and other services are slashed. In short, imperialist war and sanctions have exacerbated the privations facing working people in Italy, which escalate with each new cabinet in the revolving-door governments and can only be overcome through workers revolution.

The Anti-NATO Demonstration in Genova: A Step Forward

On February 25, the Autonomous Committee of Port Workers (CALP, Collettivo Autonomo Lavoratori Portuali) in Genova organized a demonstration of 10,000 people that marched through the large port area calling to stop arms shipments to the imperialists’ Ukraine proxy government, denouncing anti-Russia sanctions and opposing “NATO’s war.” The call for the demonstration attracted many supporters of CALP’s longstanding refusal to handle arms traffic, as in June 2019 when (alerted by French dockers in Le Havre) it successfully blocked the loading of military cargo onto a Saudi Arabian ship that was to be used in the murderous war against the Houthi population in Yemen.¹

That action and the February 25 demonstration were blows against imperialism through international proletarian solidarity action. Most CALP port workers are members of the USB (Union Sindacale di Base), a “rank-and-file” union. On March 14 of last year, workers at the airport of Pisa discovered a shipment of arms to Ukraine disguised as humanitarian aid, notified their union – also an affiliate of the USB – and refused to load the cargo. USB dock workers from the nearby port of Livorno and some 2,000 people flocked to the Pisa airport to solidarize with their action. Two weeks later, on 1 April 2022, rail worker unions in northern Greece refused to move trains loaded with NATO tanks for Ukraine as supporters of the Greek Communist Party (KKE) blocked the tracks.

The Genova demonstration was called by CALP on a low-level basis (“Put down arms, Raise wages”). However, it was politically distinct from the many “peace” demonstrations organized by the CGIL trade-union bureaucracy, the Democratic Party (PD), bourgeois pacifists and NATO socialist “leftists” – such as the huge 5 November 2022 “antiwar” march in Rome – which don’t oppose the imperialist sanctions or arms to Ukraine. On the contrary, many in those demos hail the Ukrainian fascist-infested “resistance” and raise its blue-and-gold flag. Outright social-imperialists and NATO supporters stayed away from Genova on February 25. Many youth and workers, on the other hand, saw the march as a way to express defense of Russia against NATO’s war, reflected in the warm reception that our newspaper calling to “Defend Russia and China, Defeat NATO Imperialism” received.

The February 25 Genova demonstration was supported and built by the USB, the soft Stalinist Rete dei Comunisti (RdC – Network of Communists) and its Internet daily Contropiano along with its university student supporters of Cambiare Rotta (Changing Course) and its high school supporters of Organizazione Studentesca Alternativa (OSA). Also prominent was the left-populist Potere al Popolo (PaP, Power to the People), of which RdC is a constituent part. Smaller Stalinist formations including several latter-day PCIs² were also present. Busloads arrived from as far away as Naples and other southern cities.

Clearly, most of the demonstrators were for the defeat of “NATO’s war,” and many would defend Russia and China against imperialism, some even affirming that China is “socialist,” or at least not capitalist, (The League for the Fourth International upholds the historic Trotskyist position that China is a bureaucratically deformed workers state.) Yet these Stalinist and Stalinoid tendencies are deeply nationalist, echoing the PCI’s traditional defense of the 1947 “anti-fascist” Italian Constitution, with all the illusions that implies. Thus, rather than calling to defeat U.S./NATO imperialism with workers action, many call on the Italian government to stop arms shipments and for “Italy out of NATO” and, in some cases, out of the EU. Yet a capitalist Italy “independent” of these imperialist alliances would be no less imperialist.

RdC, Contropiano and the USB along with Potere al Popolo all backed the bourgeois Unione Popolare (U.P.) electoral coalition in the September 2022 elections, and continue to campaign for this “popular front” chaining working people and the left to sections of the capitalist class. This has meant support for the U.P. standard-bearer Luigi De Magistri, a former judge and mayor of Naples. As mayor, De Magistris privatized public services, conducted a war against the public transit workers and administered capitalist austerity. Now he is supporting Article “41 bis” of the prison administration act that is essentially a slow death penalty through solitary confinement. While billed as an anti-Mafia measure, it is currently being used against the courageous anarchist prisoner Alfredo Cospito. The entire labor movement must demand: Free Alfredo Cospito!

RdC has been part of the bourgeois populist Potere al Popolo since 2017. The program of PaP calls for a “more just, more equitable society” – i.e., for an illusory reform of capitalism. Its populist program does not call for workers to take power or even class struggle but for “democratic control of the market.” Impossible! PaP wants “the people” to determine the functioning of capitalism. Like its ally and partner Podemos is doing as part of the Spanish government, administering capitalist austerity, enforcing racist laws, including in major cities like Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia, and supporting Ukraine in the NATO imperialist proxy war in Ukraine? At its 2021 Congress, RdC proclaimed: “Potere al Popolo is in fact the most advanced experience on the front of political representation.”

Elsewhere in Europe, SYRIZA (the bourgeois “Coalition of the Radical Left”) imposed capitalist austerity dictated by the Eurobankers on working people in Greece. On the other side of the Alps, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (LFI – France Unbowed), who campaigned for De Magistris and the UP at a Rome rally in September 2022, voted for the repressive “anti-terrorist” laws in 2015. More recently it sought to divert the massive revolt against the anti-worker pension “reform” into a non-binding (i.e., empty) referendum. (See “France: Drive Out Macron, Fight For a Workers Government” [March 2023].) Any government including the likes of Mélenchon’s LFI in France, UP or PaP in Italy, Podemos in Spain or SYRIZA in Greece, would be a bourgeois government, and no matter what its professed program, it would end up enforcing capitalist austerity and imperialist war.

At the February 25 demonstration in Genova, and again more recently at a June 24 “National Demonstration Against Meloni and her Warmonger Government” in Rome, the Nucleo Internazionalista d’Italia underlined the need to break with the politics of class collaboration and fight for a workers government based on factory councils (soviets). As for the USB, it commits the worst kind of class collaboration when it organizes the police and judicial system – mortal class enemies of the working class – into its ranks. We demand: Police out of the trade unions and workers movement!

RdC/USB vs. T.I.R./S.I. Cobas

Also on February 25, the same day as the Genova port workers’ protest to stop arms to Ukraine, S.I. Cobas, the largest of the “rank-and-file unions,”³ organized antiwar demonstrations in Milan, Bologna and Rome, supposedly against all sides in the fighting in Ukraine. These demonstrations had a few hundred people each, mostly from their immigrant working-class base in logistics. S.I. Cobas only sent a small contingent to Genova, primarily to express their political differences with the mobilization called by the CALP/USB. They chose not to use the occasion to initiate effective workers actions with the USB and others against the bourgeoisie sending arms to Ukraine because they didn’t want common action with those who they portray as being soft on, or even supportive of, so-called Russian “imperialism” or Chinese “imperialism.”

The call for the S.I. Cobas demonstration (sicobas.org, 24 February) was headlined with a generic leftist-pacifist slogan, “Pace tra gli oppressi, Guerra agli oppressori” (Peace Among the Oppressed, War on the Oppressors”), and an appeal “Against War, the High Cost of Living and the Government.” This was followed with a laundry list of economic/social demands (fund social programs, health and education, for wage increases to keep up with inflation, etc.), against racist policies and repression. While voicing a ritual “no to imperialist wars, no more military spending” there was no call for concrete working-class action against the war, and no mention of Ukraine, Russia, NATO or Italian imperialism. In short, a typical social-pacifist “butter not guns” appeal for a class-collaborationist “peace movement.”

This was also the case with a broader antiwar march on 3 December 2022 initiated by S.I. Cobas and the closely aligned Tendenza Internazionalista Rivoluzionaria (T.I.R.) which brought together much of the supposed “far left,” including other “rank-and-file” unions (CUB, USB, CALP), various Stalinist/Stalinoid parties (RdC, FC, FGC, PRC), some Trotskyoids (Sinistra Anticapitalista, FIR) and a number of social centers in a “board” popular front with a sector of the bourgeoisie in the form of De Magistris’ Unione Popolare. In this case, the appeal (sicobas.org, 22 November 2022) was for “Giù le arme, su i salari” (Down with Arms, Up with Wages), and again, in the interest of “unity” of the disparate tendencies, no mention of NATO, Russia or Ukraine. A generic lowest-common-denominator “peace movement.”

Subsequently, the T.I.R., a political formation consisting mostly of people in and around the S.I. Cobas, published a polemic against the forces that organized the Genova demonstration, titled “The Three Demonstrations on Saturday, February 25, and the Choices You Can’t Get Around” (Pungolo Rosso, 10 March). The three choices, according to the T.I.R., are, first, pro-Ukrainian pacifism (such as of the CGIL, the other labor federations, and their godfathers in the bourgeois PD); second, calling to oppose the NATO war (CALP/USB, Rete dei Comunisti et al.), thus (dixit T.I.R.) implicitly backing “Russian imperialism”; and a putative third “choice” (T.I.R./S.I. Cobas), against both sides in the war in Ukraine. The T.I.R. calls the latter policy revolutionary defeatism. It is not, as we explain below.

Because Rete dei Comunisti, in calling for “war against imperialist war,” denounces NATO’s war, the T.I.R. accuses it of being “water carriers” for the “bloc in formation of Russia and China,” which it labels “the major anti-Western capitalist states.” Indeed, the RdC talks of a “multipolar world taking shape” and promotes a PaP initiative, “Fermare la guerra, imporre la pace” (Stop war, impose peace), which calls to “support the proposals of China and the Vatican for peace negotiations.” These latter-day Stalinist proponents of “peaceful coexistence” also hold that “a prospect for peace can occur only and if NATO, and the forces that collaborate with it, are ‘rebalanced’ by other actors who are pointing to a diplomatic exit from the current situation” (“Genova, the Antiwar Movement Changes Its Face,” Contropiano, 26 February).

The forces for “peace through diplomacy,” according to Contrapiano, would include “a strong antiwar movement” in NATO countries, which would be “a class movement.” Yet, as the T.I.R. notes, Potere al Popolo supports the bourgeois Unione Popolare of De Magistris, who has complained of the “subservience of Europe to the United States.” Indeed, there are significant sectors of Italian capitalism that are uneasy with the U.S./NATO war against Russia, both among populist politicians and sectors of big business which profited from cheap Russian fuel, going back to the days when ENI (the state oil company) was the biggest European importer of oil from the Soviet Union. But while decrying the anti-NATO tilt, the T.I.R. does not take RdC to task for its class collaboration in allying with De Magisitris’ U.P.

This is no accident, oversight or minor omission. The appeal for the December 3 protest called by S.I. Cobas, USB and others in Rome was so watered down that the Unione Popolare, Potere al Popolo and other minor bourgeois forces endorsed and participated, like they do at pro-NATO/ Ukraine “peace demos”, such as in Rome on November 5. Moreover, while RdC calls for a “strong antiwar movement” that would be a “class movement,” the T.I.R. wants a “mass movement against the war with class connotations” (call for a June 11 “National Assembly Against the Imperialist War in Ukraine” [18 April]). In reality, all three “unavoidable choices” outlined by these would-be ideologues of the S.I. Cobas – implicitly pro-Ukraine, implicitly pro-Russia or “independent” – are calls for a popular-front “antiwar/peace movement” with sectors of the bourgeoisie. Fact: the U.P. was in all of them.

Defeat the Imperialist War Drive Against Russia and China!

As we have analyzed previously, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 set off a full-scale war between these two regional capitalist powers. Proletarian internationalists opposed both sides of this reactionary nationalist war. At the same time, the League for the Fourth International called to defeat the imperialists’ war drive against Russia and China, and to defend self-rule by the besieged Russian-speaking population in the south and east.¹¹ However, by fall 2022, the sharply escalating arming, financing, advising and ultimately control of the Ukrainian military by the U.S. and NATO reached the point that quantity turned into quality, transforming the conflict into an imperialist proxy war on Russia in which the Kiev government and army are acting on behalf of and under the direction of the U.S./NATO imperialists.

Reflecting the changed situation, the LQI shifted its position and now called for the defeat of the U.S./NATO proxy regime in Ukraine and for military defense of Russia, while giving no political support to, and calling for workers struggle against, the reactionary bourgeois nationalist Putin government.¹² In contrast, by falsely labeling the war in Ukraine as “imperialist” on both sides, the T.I.R. and its propaganda bloc partners refuse to defend those fighting against the actual war on Russia by all the imperialists, Italy included. And while hypocritically declaring that they are “not at all indifferent to the desire of most of the Donbass populations suffering from Kiev’s ethnic cleansing to join the Russian Federation,” the T.I.R. says this “has no role” in the war (call for June 11 “National Assembly Against the Imperialist War in Ukraine”).

To cover up its refusal to undertake concrete action against its “own” imperialist rulers, the T.I.R. resorts to vague/ambiguous characterizations. It refers to the Meloni government as simply capitalist “with ‘neo-liberal policies’,” a “government of the right,” or at most “the first postwar executive under an explicitly post-MSI leadership” for which “directly invoking fascism leads astray.” But this is not just another right-wing cabinet, it is the first fascist-led Italian government since World War II. This means that unions and left groups must prepare workers defense groups against police repression and also by squads of strikebreakers, as has already happened and will intensify. It means that workers action to stop war materiel from the fascist-led Rome government to the fascist-infested Kiev U.S./NATO proxy government could be met with bloody attacks, which must be resisted and defeated.

The main operative part of the line of the T.I.R. and its propaganda bloc partners is their call to “politically combat” those who call to oppose “NATO’s war,” who are labeled “defensists,” “sovereigntists” and advocates of a “multipolar” world. This is justified with the fiction that those in NATO’s bomb sights are equivalent to the imperialists, talking of a “global clash in an advanced state of gestation between the great powers of decaying Western imperialism and the new rising capitalist powers.”¹³ Dancing around the key issue of whether Russia and China are imperialist while never quite saying so, the T.I.R. equates the present conflict with the inter-imperialist World War I: “capitalist wars that have as their object the carving up of the world market, or parts of it, as is the current war in Ukraine” (“Against ‘Defensism’…”).

It is absurd to portray the current war as one of two similarly powerful capitalist-imperialist blocs competing for markets. As we noted in “The Bugbear of ‘Russian Imperialism’,”¹⁴ Russia is a net importer of capital and its exports are overwhelmingly (three-quarters) of energy and raw materials, a structure closer to that of a semi-colonial country such as Iran or Venezuela. As for China, despite dangerous capitalist inroads, the key economic sectors are still state-owned, the fundamental course of the economy is dictated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) not by market forces, and as one economist’s letter to the Wall Street Journal (4 August 2021) put it, “China’s ‘State Capitalism’ Is Not Capitalism.” The myth of a “capitalist China” was wishful thinking by the bourgeoisie, which has been picked up by the left in order not to defend China.

Imperialist Proxy War on Russia in Ukraine: Test for Revolutionaries

Imperialist war is an acid test for all would-be revolutionary tendencies. Since WWI, it has been axiomatic for Leninists that communists and all class-conscious workers are duty-bound to stand with non-imperialist countries in wars with imperialism, especially when “their own” imperialist rulers are among the warmongers. Lenin stressed this in Socialism and War (1915):

“For example, if tomorrow, Morocco were to declare war on France, or India on Britain, or Persia or China on Russia, and so on, these would be ‘just’, and ‘defensive’ wars, irrespective of who would be the first to attack; any socialist would wish the oppressed, dependent and unequal states victory over the oppressor, slaveholding and predatory ‘Great’ Powers.”

In line with this, after the war and the formation of the Communist International, the French Communist Party (PCF) launched a campaign in defense of the Berber insurgency led by Abd el-Krim in the Rif region of Morocco, leading to a general strike in France against the war on 12 October 1925 (and the arrests of up to 1,000 PCF and worker militants). Later, in 1949-50, Marseille dock workers refused to load munitions for French forces waging imperialist war in Vietnam.

Some erudite hair-splitters have argued: yes, but Morocco and India were colonies, and Iran and China were semi-colonies, while Russia today is no semi-colony. True, it is an intermediate country targeted by the united imperialists. Yet already in 1920-22, Soviet Russia under Lenin’s leadership militarily supported Turkey, the remnant of the Ottoman Empire, led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, against the Western imperialists. In 1935, Trotsky and the Trotskyists called to defend Ethiopia under Emperor Haile Selassie, a slave-owning feudalist, against the invasion by Italian imperialism. And in 1939, Trotsky called to defend China under Chiang Kai-shek against the Japanese imperialist invasion. These were all independent states, ruled by brutal nationalists, but the overriding issue was to defeat the imperialist military attack or threats.

Moreover, the T.I.R.’s call for “war against war” and for building an “antiwar movement … with class connotations” recall the Italian Socialists’ policy of neutrality in World War I. Its call to oppose “all wars of capital” would mean opposing defense of any capitalist country under attack by imperialism. This resembles “Maximalist” Socialist Giacinto Serrati’s opposition to Lenin’s theses on the national question at the Comintern’s Second Congress (1920), which called to defend bourgeois-democratic “national liberation movements” against imperialism. Serrati accused the theses of “class collaboration,” although they called to “unconditionally maintain the independent character of the proletarian movement.”¹⁸ The militant syndicalist line has a huge blind spot when it comes to imperialism, particularly regarding imperialist world domination.

In contrast, the League for the Fourth International fought from 2001 on to defend Iraq and Afghanistan and to defeat the U.S.-led imperialist invasions and occupations of those countries, while giving no political support to Saddam Hussein or the Taliban. And not only at the level of propaganda, but agitating on the docks for U.S. port workers to “hot cargo” (refuse to handle) arms shipments to the region as early as 2002.¹⁹ The LFI playing a significant role in the May Day 2008 shutdown of all U.S. West Coast ports against the war in Afghanistan and Iraq.²⁰ And it defended Yugoslavia against the 1999 U.S./NATO war while denouncing the Serbian nationalist regime of Slobodan Milosevi?.²¹ Italy was directly involved in these wars. Where did, or does, the T.I.R. stand? Did or does it defend those countries attacked by imperialism?

These are not abstract or academic questions. At issue here is whether those who profess to be communists have the program to prepare the working class for the revolutionary struggle for power, or not. The propaganda bloc led by the T.I.R., with its passive propagandist neutrality on the war in Ukraine, as indicated above, recycles the policies of the centrist Italian Socialists in World War I that prevented the PSI (and the nascent PCI) from playing a revolutionary role at the end of the war, and thus set the stage for fascism. Those who refuse to defend the targets of imperialism, who try to duck the issue by declaring all sides imperialist, cannot lead the fight for international socialist revolution. Today they act as an obstacle to militant class struggle against the real imperialists and their war drive against Russia and China careening toward World War III.

What is behind these blinders that the propaganda bloc around the T.I.R. and S.I. Cobas have put on to hide the nature of the U.S./NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine? At the June 11 meeting in Milan, the Fronte Comunista declared that the public has been “bombarded by years and years of propaganda from one camp or the other.” Nonsense! The general public, working people and the left have been bombarded for years, in Italy and throughout Europe, by relentless imperialist anti-Russia war propaganda, to which, over the war in Ukraine, most of the left has capitulated. What the T.I.R., FC, FCG et al. are combatting is the sentiment in the working-class and immigrant ranks of S.I. Cobas and other combative unions to oppose the U.S./NATO imperialist war. Just read:

“We must clearly denounce the fascination with the hypothesis of a new multipolar world.... Supporting such positions are the nationalist, sovereigntist and campist forces in Italy that directly or indirectly support the interests of Russia, China and all countries that are competitors or opponents of the U.S.-driven world order….

“The calls for international equality, for rescuing the oppressed from hundreds of years of exploitation and for democratization, are weapons perfectly calibrated to appeal to the sentiments of payback of those who have themselves experienced the U.S., EU and NATO brand of capitalist exploitation.... In the name of proletarian internationalism, we have the task of denouncing and not promoting such war propaganda. Those in Italy today who stand for a multipolar world are hindering, more or less consciously, the birth of a real war-on-war movement.”

–Intervention of the Fronte Comunista at the June 11 Milan meeting

The T.I.R. et al. portray all those who “directly or indirectly” side with Russia and China as supporters of a “multipolar world order.” This may apply to the Rete dei Comunisti, Potere al Popolo and other reformist and bourgeois populist forces who hark back to the Stalinist illusion of impossible “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism. It is certainly true of the bourgeois nationalist and Stalinist nationalist rulers of Russia and China, respectively. But it is a gross distortion when referring to the several thousand youth and workers who marched in Genova on February 25 to stop arms to Ukraine and “block NATO’s war.” And it is a slander when referring to those who call for a revolutionary internationalist, proletarian struggle to defend Russia and China against the imperialist war drive and to defeat the U.S./NATO proxy regime in Kiev.

Revolutionary Marxists are not pacifists. We do not build “peace movements,” which as Trotsky wrote in 1917, invariably turn into pro-war movements, as is the case of the pro-Ukraine “peace” demos currently. Genuine Trotskyists intervene in popular-front “antiwar” movements as a revolutionary opposition to the reformist/bourgeois organizers, to bring to the masses the program of defeating imperialist war through international socialist revolution. The pseudo-leftists who refuse to defend Russia and China against imperialism have been seduced by the siren song of “human rights imperialism.” The whole “human rights” business was invented at the dawn of the imperialist Cold War as a weapon against the Soviet Union, and is now being blasted at top volume in defense of the fascist/nationalist coup regime in Ukraine.

The decaying capitalist system generates endless wars. Lenin insisted that any talk of “peace” without mass revolutionary proletarian struggle is pure illusion. The attacks on workers’ living standards and social programs, the repression of workers’ struggles and assault on immigrants are all part of the imperialist war drive. In order to defeat them and stop the imperialists rush toward WW III it is necessary to fight to defeat the U.S./NATO war on Russia and defend the Chinese deformed workers state against imperialism and counterrevolution. This is, in fact, the only basis to fight for socialist revolution in Russia and for a proletarian political revolution in China. To refuse to defend them against the imperialist assault seeking to crush and dismember them is nothing less than a stab in the back of Russian and Chinese workers.

 The present fascist-led government in Italy and increasingly dire situation of working people throughout Europe and the entire capitalist world, underlines the unreformability of decaying capitalism and the urgent need to forge a genuinely communist party. This party cannot be built on the basis of capitulation to imperialism or the politics of class collaboration, but must be based on a solid Leninist-Trotskyist program. We of the Nucleo Internazionalista d’Italia/Lega per la Quarta Internazionale are dedicated to forging this party. ■