US imperialism faces a worsening global financial and economic crisis that has already hit its own domestic economy. It has intervened destructively in every part of the planet. It has provoked sharp revolutionary and counterrevolutionary clashes such as in Palestine and Argentina, and wars to re-colonise countries like Afghanistan. It is clear that US imperialism is trying to solve its problems at the expense of the exploited workers with new wars against the oppressed peoples of the world.

Since 1989 the US has been able to introduce capitalist restoration in the former worker states where its Stalinist bureaucratic agents became open restorationists. It also succeeded in the brutal Balkan war where the US led a coalition of imperialist members of NATO, to drown the Albanian-Kosovar people and the Serb working class in a bloodbath, smashing the factories, the bridges, and the cities.

In Indonesia, the imperialist oil monopolies –British as well as Australian—organized the massacre in East Timor. Today they sponsor fratricidal wars between the different ethnic groups and nations, thus strangling and diverting the revolution begun in 1997 by the Indonesian workers, students and oppressed people. Similarly, its agents, the Russian bourgeoisie and its counter-revolutionary army, are inflicting a terrible genocide against the Chechen people in their independence struggle.

More than a year ago, the Anglo-US and French imperialists crushed and destroyed Afghanistan with bombs to gain control of the oil pipelines from the Caspian and Central Asia. Afghanistan was transformed into a protectorate occupied by imperialist troops. The imperialists are using Sharon and the army of the Zionist state of Israel to crush the heroic fight of the Palestinian masses that began two years ago.

The US imperialists planned a Pinochet-style coup in Venezuela to gain control the oil production of the PdVSA and ensure cheap crude for industry and transport in the United States. But the coup was defeated by the revolutionary intervention of the exploited masses. Now the US is backing a eight-week long lock-out which reveals the craven weakness of the national bourgeoisie in the face of imperialism.

US imperialism imposes a brutal economic policy in Argentina in order to repress the workers and other oppressed people who began a revolution in December 2001, and to make an example to all the exploited and the oppressed nations of Latin America and the world. The US under the Plan Colombia sends its marines and military advisers, and supplies arms to the Colombian army and the paramilitary gangs, to slaughter the peasants in the countryside and the workers in the cities, creating a beach-head for future counter-revolutionary interventions in the continent.

Today, the US imperialists prepare a new attack on Iraq, deploying the thousands of airplanes, ships, artillery and bombs with an unprecedented destructive capacity. It will cost more than $200.000 million dollars to blow Iraq to bits and perpetrate another genocide against its people.

It is clear that the working class all over the world is facing a full-on counterrevolutionary offensive aimed at crushing any attempt by the working class and the exploited people of the semi-colonial nations to offer resistance to the imperialists plans of re-colonization.

As their own economists admit with total cynicism, they are preparing a new massacre of the Iraqi people –Arabs as well as Kurds –because they need a "war of short duration" that will allow them to "reactivate the world economy". No less cynically Bush and the US ruling class are already counting the hundreds of billions of dollars that they will make by capturing the enormous reserves of oil in Iraq. They say that the $200.000 million dollars that the war will cost will be recouped many times.

It is clear that this rotting capitalist system in its imperialist old age can only survive the present crisis by forcing the exploited workers further into misery and starvation, and by destroying enormous productive forces in re-colonial wars such as the one against Afghanistan and that being prepared against Iraq. To achieve peace, capitalism has to be overthrown. Only the working class can achieve this historical task.

The imperialists squabble over the spoils of war.

They now agree to go to war to recolonise Iraq behind the figleaf of the UN den of thieves.

The US, British, French, German, Italian, and Japanese imperialist warmongers, are all squabbling over their shares of Iraqi oil wealth – the second largest reserve in the world after Saudi Arabia – and over control of the oil pipeline routes in the Middle East.

The British imperialists, headed by the new crusader Tony Blair, have already declared their total support to the war against Iraq. The French and German imperialists have already negotiated agreements with Saddam Hussein to make large investments in Iraqi petroleum wells. More than a year ago they broke the blockade imposed on Iraq since the Gulf war of 1991. Now they pressure the US to prepare an attack under the cover of the UN.

At this point, US imperialism has had to accept an agreement with its French and German imperialist rivals, to pass a UN resolution to defer an immediate attack and to send in spies – the UN’s “inspectors”. These inspectors are nothing more than a cover for the imperialistic powers to re-negotiate how they will distribute the oil wealth of Iraq and all join in the launching of their predatory war. Thus, the US and British imperialists – at the same time that the UN inspectors have entered Iraq – have intensified their bombings and daily attacks against the workers and peoples of Iraq.

As for the French imperialists, once the US showed a willingness to share some of the oil wealth of Iraq, they gave their total support to the UN resolution and preparation for the attack on Iraq. Chirac has sent his murderous troops to save the régime in the Ivory Coast, in Africa – the major world producer of cocoa. This is the latest of many military interventions in the region among rival imperialists to recolonise these nations and gain control of valuable raw materials, at the expense of the starvation, superexploitation, HIV/AIDS and the genocide of the working class and oppressed people. Meanwhile he has just given the order to the French army of get ready to attack Iraq.

At the same time, the imperialists are using the pretext of “investigating the Iraqi military arsenal” in an attempt to justify the launching of a new war. Behind this cover the treacherous leaderships of the working class movement in the World Social Forum try to tell workers that the UN can stop the war. They help to neutralize the pacifist majority in the anti-war movement in the imperialistic countries and isolate the militant anti-imperialist wing. Meanwhile, US imperialism, as the world hegemonic power, claims it has the right to make a ‘unilateral’ attack without waiting for the “authorization” of the UN. At the same time it is preparing its next attack, this time against the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea (North Korea).

The imperialists are going to war against Iraq to also teach a lesson to the Palestinian working class and masses, the Argentinean revolutionaries, and the exploited masses of the whole world.

The war that the imperialists are preparing against Iraq is a warning to the world revolution, especially to the two major class struggles under way in Palestine and in Argentina.

In Palestine, the imperialist powers and their gendarme, the state of Israel and its genocidal army, continue their counter-revolutionary military offensive. Their objective is to turn a partial defeat of the national struggle into a decisive defeat of the Palestinian revolution that began with the intifada. They seek to crush resistance by force and impose an apartheid regime which oversees the oppression and the double exploitation of the Palestine people; first by imperialism and the Zionist bourgeoisie, and second by the Palestinian, Lebanese and Jordanian bourgeoisies.

This is why the US and French imperialists, despite supporting the Zionist’s slaughter the Palestinian people, the destruction of their cities, and the bombing of the Palestine National Authority headquarteres, also make an effort to preserve Arafat and his men. They calculate that once the revolution is smashed, imperialism will need Arafat to police his own people and enforce an apartheid regime.

Sections of the imperialist bourgeoisies fear that an attack on Iraq would release the build-up of hatred in the masses of the Middle East against their own states and bourgeois governments for allowing the massacres in Palestine and Afghanistan. This could lead to new revolutionary and anti-imperialist uprisings. The first to rise up will be the millions of Palestinians that live in Jordan and Lebanon, and this could spark once more the fire of the Palestinian revolution out of the ashes and the debri of Jenin, of Ramallah, and the other destroyed Palestinian cities.

They also fear that a new war against Iraq will multiply a thousand fold the hatred and the anti-imperialist struggles of the working class and the exploited peoples of Latin America. But above all, their main fear is that they will provoke the uprising of their own working class in the imperialist countries. Already, in Europe, the proletariat is showing signs of beginning to awake.

In the imperialist countries, the main enemy is at home!

While the imperialist warmongers prepare a new massacre, the world’s working class must urgently prepare an international response to the aggression against Iraq. UK, Italy and US’ workers kick-started the response with their huge mobilizations.

¡They are the allies of the Iraqi people and of the oppressed people of the entire world!

Clearly whoever wins the new war against Iraq will be able to influence the victory of revolution or counterrevolution not only in Palestine and the Middle East, but also in Latin America and Argentina. If the imperialists win, and the Iraqi masses are defeated, this will be a decisive blow to the Palestinian working class and oppressed people and all the masses of the Middle East. But it will be also a major defeat of the Argentinean revolution and the struggle of the masses in Latin America, because the imperialist murderers will redouble their re-colonising offensive in that continent.

The destiny of the working class of the US and of the European powers will also hinge importantly on the outcome of the war. If the imperialists have a great victory over the Iraqi people, they will be empowered to launch more far-reaching attacks on their own working classes.

The European and North American proletariats are shackled by the labor bureaucracies of the US AFL-CIO, central unions of France, Germany and Italy and Great Britain, and by the parties of the labor aristocracy such as the Social Democratic, Labor and so-called Communist parties, to their own imperialist bourgeoisies. They have not been able, in recent years, to offer support and aid to their brothers and sisters in Iraq, Kosovo, Afghanistan, or in Palestine. Today, these same union bureaucracies and treacherous parties support the UN, under whose cover the new murderous war against Iraq is been prepared.

Already the working class of the imperialist powers have paid a very heavy price for their subordination to their ruling classes forced on them by the treacherous labour leaders. It has cost them more than one million unemployed, slashed wages and job insecurity in the United States, and attacks on past gains, a brutal flexibilization of work, and privatization offensives in Spain, Italy, France and Germany.

Everywhere, under the pretext of “the war on terrorism”, democratic rights are under attack by bourgeois governments. In the United States after the 11 of September 2001, the government imposed a “national unity” in support of the “war on terrorism”, enlisting the loyal support of the leadership of the AFL-CIO. This has allowed terrible attacks on the working class including millions of layoffs, persecutions and accusations of ‘treason’ to be made against any form of dissent or strike action against the war. Thousands of Muslim workers, or workers of Arab origin, have been imprisoned as “suspects” without trial or right to defence.

Therefore, in the face of this concerted preparation for war, it is necessary that the workers of the world prepare an international response, standing unconditionally in the trenches of the Iraqi nation, of the Palestinian workers and oppressed people, and of the workers and the people of Argentina and all those countries oppressed and attacked by imperialism.

It is necessary for the world working class to raise the war cry: ¡Halt the attack to Iraq! Down with the den of thieves of the UN! For the military defeat of US imperialism and all the imperialist powers! For the military victory of Iraq! Weapons for Iraq and Palestine!

The best outcome for the oppressed masses and the workers of the world would be to turn the attacks against Palestine, Iraq, and all the oppressed peoples in the Middle East, into a historic defeat for the US and European warmongers such as that inflicted on the US in Vietnam in 1975, and a grave for Sharon and the state of Israel, the hired killers of imperialism!

For the defeat of the genocidal army of Sharon and Bush! For the destruction of the Zionist state of Israel! For a secular, democratic and multiracial Palestinian State under a workers and peasants’ government based on the armed, independent militia of the Palestinian working class and oppressed people!

While Tony Blair beat the drums of war and and geared up his military for an attack on Iraq, on Saturday 28 of September, more than 250,000 people marched through London. In the United States a number of local unions, and some national unions, have begun to take a stand against the war and against the bureaucracy of the AFL-CIO. There were 200,000 mobilized in Washington and San Francisco on October 12. In Italy, on November 9, 500,000 workers and youth marched against the war.

The hatred of the masses towards a new imperialistic war has forced petty-bourgeois pacifists and the labor bureaucracies to try to channel the anti-war movement into appeals to their own governments and the UN to make peace. Up to now, they, with the help of anarchists and treacherous ‘trotskyists’, have been successful in in controlling the movement by this means.

For example the pseudo-Trotskyist SWP of Britain and the LCR of France have issued a common declaration with the recycled Stalinists of the Rifondazione Comunista Party of Italy. Addressed to “the citizens of Europe” and “their representatives” it says: “The voices of those that are on the side of the people of Iraq will not be heard by the White House. But we have the possibility of influencing the European governments...” (Rouge, 19/09/01).

This proves, once again, the urgent necessity of building Leninist-Trotskyist, internationalist revolutionary workers parties, dedicated to building the world party of socialist revolution.

The working class of the imperialist countries, in beginning to wake up, has in its hands the potential power to paralyze the imperialist war machine from within. To release this power, it is necessary to fight staunchly so that the militant workers of America, Europe, and Japan, break the control that the labor aristocracy, the traditional bourgeois-worker parties and the union bureaucracies, hold over them.

The immediate task is to unite the workers’ ranks, first in solidarity with the millions of immigrants of Moslem and Arab origin that are treated as pariahs and super-exploited labor in United States, Europe and other countries, and second, in confronting their own imperialist bourgeoisies. They must use the class struggle methods of strikes, mobilizations, boycotts and blockades, to paralyse the imperialist war machine from within, so that no warship, no warplane, or soldier, can attack Iraq. At the same time they must make sure that weapons, food and medicines are delivered to the workers and people of Iraq and to the workers and people of Palestine.

The advanced workers in the labor movement in the imperialistic countries must immediately demand; first, that all the labor organizations, and their leaderships, come out strongly against the war; second, that they actively oppose the war plans of the imperialist bourgeoisie and stand shoulder to shoulder in combat with their class brothers and sisters in the semi-colonial countries under attack by imperialism. At the same time, they must denounce the subservient role played by the Labor, Social Democrat and Stalinist leaderships, in support of imperialism and the UN –an extreme example of which Tony Blair and his Labour government leading the preparations for the re-colonial war against Iraq.

The signatories to this statement call on all workers organizations and parties that call themselves anti-imperialist, along with the all the militant workers of the imperialist powers, to immediately raise as their war cry:

“The enemy is at home: boycott and paralyze from within the machinery of war! For the military defeat of our own genocidal imperialists! For the military victory of the Iraqi nation under attack!”

The the best weapon of mass destruction against the imperialist warmongers in the Middle East, is the expropriation of all the property and interests of the imperialist monopolies by the revolutionary mobilization of the workers and peasants of the region.

In Latin America today two decisive battles are being fought. In Venezuela, American imperialism is attempting another coup because the US needs to control the supply of Venezuelan oil in the event of a war against Iraq. The situation is very tense between those openly pro-imperialist bourgeois forces behind the attempted coup and the 8 week lock out, and the the weak and cowardly national bourgeoisie backing Chavez –the same class that has been imposing the IMF plans against the masses.

It is necessary that the workers and the exploited masses, assert their political independence from both sections of the bourgeoisie. They must create committees of workers and soldiers that crush the pro-coup reactionaries, the managers and the union bureaucracy of the CTV (Central Union), and occupy the oil wells and the refineries to break the lock out of the big bosses and the imperialists.

In Argentina, the urgent task is to fight to break out of the impasse where the actions of the reformist leaderships have bogged down the revolution. Every effort must be made to create a revolutionary leadership –the decisive factor in the advance of the Argentinean revolution—and to fight for the masses to open up the road that will lead to a National Congress of employed and unemployed workers and Popular Assemblies. Such a Congress must centralize all the workers struggle organisations and prepare for a new December 20 that throws out the government and all the institutions of the hated régime. The only way to stop this revolution retreating is to build armed dual power organs of the fighting masses that pose for themselves the task of seizing power.

These are the two immediate central tasks of the working class and the exploited in Latin America, acting in solidarity with our class brothers and sisters of Iraq, Palestine and the whole Middle East, in the fight against the common enemy –the imperialist powers headed by the US. In these two decisive struggles the key is to overcome the counterrevolutionary policies of Stalinism and the World Social Forum and to confront the popular fronts such as that of Lula and the big boss Alencar in Brazil, that make the workers submit to alliances with the bourgeoisie. All the reformist leaders and the false “trotskyists” that form the left wing of the popular front of the World Social Forum want to strangle the revolutionary struggles of the masses in Latin America. They are ready to try to contain the shock waves of the revolutionary processes such as that which has begun in Argentina.

Therefore, it is necessary that the workers’ vanguard regroups into Leninist revolutionary parties. Without such parties the working class and the oppressed cannot advance to the overthrow of the client regimes serving imperialism, and create Workers’ and Peasants’ Governments able to expropriate the national and imperialist bourgeoisie and to establish a Socialist United States of South America. For the Latin American proletariat, allied to its class bothers and sisters of the imperialist countries, the fight to defeat the imperialist butchers who are today preparing to smash Iraq, is a question of life and death.

The war cry of the working class and the oppressed masses of the entire world must be heard loudly:

“US and all the imperialist powers: hands off Afghanistan!”

The impending attack on Iraq is designed also to complete and consolidate the victory already won in Afghanistan, and to teach a new lesson to all those who dare to stand up against imperialism. Look at the thousands of Moslem workers and workers of Arab origin rotting in the Yankee jails! Look at the prisoners of war, that hardly survived the massacres perpetrated by the US army in Kunduz and Mazar i Shariff, locked up in Guantánamo as hostages of imperialism!

US imperialism tries to hide the fact that the Muslim reactionaries including Bin Laden were their creations. It blames them to avoid revealing that the true terrorists, the true murderers and genocidists, those responsible for the worst cruelties made against the workers and the oppressed peoples of the world, are the imperialist powers, and in the first place, US imperialism.

Therefore, it is necessary that the working class and the exploited from all over the world inscribe on their battle flags the fight for the immediate and unconditional freedom of the militiamen imprisoned in Guantánamo, and for the immediate and unconditional freedom of all the Arabs and Muslims jailed by Bush!

Only the workers and the oppressed people of the world can impose a defeat, such as that of the US in Vietnam in 1975, on the imperialist warmongers. No military defeat of the imperialists is going to come at the hands of the Saddam Husseins, Arafats, or Khomenini’s successors. The Arab and Iranian national bourgeoisies only want to haggle with imperialism for their share of the oil income and the exploitation of their own people. As soon as the struggle of the masses threatens their political control and their own property, they will quickly make peace with their imperialist masters. They prefer to see the defeat and destruction of their own countries rather than have the armed uprising of the anti-imperialist working class and the peasants threaten a single property owned by the imperialist monopolies!

We Marxist, internationalist revolutionaries, are not pacifists. We locate ourselves unconditionally in the military trenches of the oppressed nation under attack, and fight for its military victory and for the defeat of imperialism in the war. We do this because a military defeat at the hands of the imperialist powers would mean that Iraq would be then tied to imperialism with double and triple chains of oppression. We say that it is the working class and the poor peasants of Iraq, Egypt, Syria and all the oppressed nations of the Middle East, in alliance with their militant class brothers and sisters in the imperialist powers, and with the workers and exploited masses all over the world, that can the defeat of the imperialist warmongers.

The Iraqi proletariat will begin the war under a bourgeois leadership in a military united action against imperialism, but it must not give any political support to Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi bourgeoisie. Maintaining its armed independence, it must fight to defeat the bourgeois government during the course of the war, and thus transform the war against imperialism into the beginning of the proletarian revolution in Iraq.

The Kurds and the Shiites are both oppressed by Saddam Hussein's régime. But they should not in any way align with the imperialist powers. The American bourgeoisie has no moral authority to speak or act on the question of the rights of oppressed peoples, especially those of the Kurds. The proletarian vanguard should wage a resolute fight for secular freedom to guarantee equal rights to the exploited and oppressed of any religion, and so help unite the proletariat in the fight for its emancipation. The Arab proletariat of Iraq must recognize the national rights of the Kurdish people, including the right to secession, to unify the proletariat of the country against imperialism and, in the course of this combat, against the Iraqi bourgeoisie.

The fight for the defeat of imperialism in Iraq and in the Middle East, and for the victory of the Palestinian revolution, is ultimately expressed in the fight for a Federation of Workers and Peasants Republics of the Middle East. But to achieve this, the help of the proletariat in the imperialist countries is necessary.

For the widest unity of action in support of our Iraqi and Palestinian brothers and sisters!

With this perspective, the Leninist-Trotskyist organizations that have signed this statement call on the popular and workers organizations, and the workers and anti-imperialist parties, in our countries, to unite in the broadest anti-imperialist action. We must take to the streets with marches, strikes, demonstrations, and to rally the popular and workers organizations everywhere in the world to fight against the common enemy, imperialism, and against the client states and governments of the semicolonial countries that are its servants. In this way, we, the workers and oppressed people, will be capable of defeating the genocidal and re-colonization war that is being prepared against Iraq.

The revolutionary organizations that have signed this declaration are fighting and will continue fighting for it to be adopted inside the unions and in all the fighting organizations of the masses.

We Leninist-Trotskyists demand that all those organizations that speak on behalf of the working class and the poor peasants, break their subordination to imperialism and the bourgeois state, and rally their organizations in the service of the anti-imperialist fight side by side with their class brothers and sisters of the semi-colonial peoples under attack. In this way, revolutionaries fight for the masses to unify their ranks, and through their mobilisation, to break the barriers that the treacherous and corrupt bureaucracy impose on the workers’ organisations.

Let’s take to the streets in support to our Iraqi and Palestinian brothers and sisters!

For the military defeat of the Yankee and all imperialist powers!

For the military victory of the Iraqi nation under attack!

Weapons for Iraq and for Palestine!

For the military defeat of Sharon's and Bush’s genocidal army!

For the destruction of the Zionist state of Israel, gendarme of imperialism in the Middle East!

Out with the US and European imperialist warmongers in Afghanistan, in Africa, in Asia and in Latin America!

Imperialist hands off the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of (North) Korea!

Out with the IMF in Latin America and in Argentina! Down with Duhalde, and the entire client governments and servants of the Yankees and the IMF!

Down with the imperialist governments, butchers and murderers of the oppressed peoples of the world! Our answer to the aggression and the imperialistic war, and to definitively defeat them, cannot be other than the fight to impose revolutionary dictatorships of the proletariat which will begin to mark the end of the rotten imperialistic capitalist system.

Iraq, Palestine and Argentina, together with the working class of the imperialist countries making war, shall lead the proletarian revolution that destroys imperialist rule, raising the war cry of the world proletariat:

¡So that the working class and the exploited of the world can live, imperialism must die!

Signatories

· Groupe Bolchévik –pour la construction du Parti ouvrier révolutionnaire de l’International ouvrière révolutionnaire France

For the widest unity of action in support of our Iraqi and Palestinian brothers and sisters!

Signatories

· Lucha Marxista, de Perú

· Grupo Obrero Internacionalista (CI), de Chile

· LOI (CI)-Democracia Obrera, de Argentina

February 2003