Germany · de.indymedia · · 3h
Antithesi: The “Third Camp” revisited
Deutsch (original) · Auto-translated to English
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An English version can be found directly on the Athens group websitehttps://antithesi.gr"class="spip_out" rel="external">Antithesi:https://antithesi.gr/the-third-camp-revisited-proletarian-internationali...class="spip_url spip_out auto" rel="nofollow external">https://antithesi.gr/the-third-camp-revisited-proletarian-internationali...class='autobr' />
Another translation comes from the anarchist grouphttps://panopticon.noblogs.org/post/2026/08/23/das-dritte-lager-neu-betr...class="spip_out" rel="external">Panopticon
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Proletarian internationalism in war and national “liberation”
The following reflections are based on a series of meetings and conversations over the past year in which we examined the history of proletarian internationalism and its significance for the present. These debates were given particular urgency by the worrying resurgence of campism in radical – and increasingly also in less radical – political milieus. Once again there is a tendency to subordinate criticism of states, war and capitalist rule to support for the “lesser evil”, a national camp citing the real oppression of the population it claims to represent, or of forces attributed to the “resistance against imperialism”. From Ukraine to West Asia to Southeast Asia, the increasing pressure to choose between competing imperialist or national camps has once again become a central political problem.
Some discussions that took place in Paris in spring 2026 gave these questions a more concrete shape. At the center of one of these debates was a translation of texts by Marie-Louise Berneri from War Commentary for Anarchism and Freedom, which is currently being worked on and which had been compiled in Neither East Nor West.1 Another discussion focused on the recently deceased Henri Simon - the council communist and former member of Socialisme ou Barbarie, who died at the age of 102 - and his relationship with Henry Chazé. He was one of the defining figures of both the Union Communiste and the French faction of the International Communist Left.
These encounters pointed beyond any single organization or political tradition to a broader history of proletarian internationalism that had developed across communist and anarchist currents in resistance to capitalist war and to the political forms that repeatedly subordinated the proletariat to it. These range from anti-fascist class collaboration to national “liberation” and the idea of “just national wars” and finally the partisanship of an imperialist camp that presents itself as “anti-imperialist”. But rediscovering this history raises a more difficult question than simply restating an internationalist or “third camp” position: why did this position remain almost entirely a minority position within the class after 1920?
The problem, however, was not just the numerical weakness of these movements. The groups that adhered to an internationalist position rarely found access - and even then usually only for a short time and to a limited extent - to the mass movements of the class to which they appealed. They were small, worked underground, were persecuted, were theoretically astute and organizationally fragile. They wrote for a class that was overwhelmingly moving in the opposite direction, whether under national flags, in anti-fascist fronts or in liberation armies.
The revolutionary wave of 1917 to 1920 is the obvious exception: this was a moment when the position of the masses actually reversed on a large scale. Between 1917 and 1920 – in Russia, Germany and Hungary, in parts of Italy and through the mutinies that shook the Entente armies towards the end of the war – internationalist opposition to war briefly became a material force. Soldiers fraternized across the trenches and refused to fight, workers went on strike at production and formed councils.
Lenin's formula to “turn the imperialist war into a civil war” was not just a slogan. She was describing something that actually happened. This movement was driven not primarily by the Bolshevik organization, but by the exhaustion, anger and political radicalization of millions who were sent to their deaths to die for interests that were obviously not their own. What made this connection possible was not primarily the correctness of the political line. It was the material exhaustion of years in the trenches, combined with an already existing organizational density in the working class, that could be reactivated in a different direction. By 1921 or 1922 the revolutionary wave had been crushed almost everywhere. Therefore, when the next major cycle of wars began in the 1930s and 1940s, the internationalist position was once again largely confined to small minorities. Why the connection between war weariness, class organization and revolutionary internationalism came about then, and why it has not been repeated in the same way since, is the most important question this experience raises. It is a question that we consciously want to keep open as the discussion continues.
The starting point of proletarian internationalism is the rejection of the pressure that is repeatedly exerted on the proletarians to have to choose between state camps. This rejection is based on the insight that war does not represent a deviation from the normal functioning of capitalism, but rather a consolidation of it. It intensifies interstate competition for markets, territories and labor, rearranges production through destruction, and imposes a discipline that cannot be enforced in the same way in peacetime. This pressure does not only come in the form of patriotism or supremacist nationalism. It can also appear as anti-fascism, national liberation, defense of democracy, anti-imperialism, resistance to occupation or support for the lesser evil. Regardless of its specific form, it leads to the abandonment of proletarian autonomy in favor of a supposedly more urgent political task.
This tendency, often referred to as the proletarian “third camp” or “third choice,” rejected the logic of the “lesser evil” between state apparatuses. A weaker capitalism in conflict with a stronger one remains capitalism. A state that is dominated or attacked therefore does not stop organizing exploitation, disciplining work, controlling populations and binding classes together in the form of the nation. The nation is one of the political forms in which class antagonism is displaced: a society divided by exploitation appears as a common community of citizens bound together by a common interest, a common fate and, in war, a common enemy. The defeat of an imperialist bloc only changes the balance of power within global competition. It represents neither a victory for the working class nor a step towards its self-abolition. It does not even question imperialism as such. Democratic war machines, national liberation movements and authoritarian or theocratic opponents of the West ultimately demand the same disclaimer in different languages. The autonomous class struggle should be suspended in the name of a supposedly higher political necessity.
The political clarity of the internationalist movement did not arise from sectarianism or isolation as such. It arose from the fact that these militants were forced by the reactionary development of the workers' movement itself to break with the forms through which that movement was incorporated into the state, the nation and the war effort. Its political clarity was therefore formed in a series of successive breaks: in 1914 with social patriotism, with Stalinism, with the defense of the USSR, with anti-fascist class collaboration, with national liberation as a form of capitalist modernization and state building, and finally with any idea that proletarian emancipation could lead to the victory of a state or imperialist camp.
The minority position of explicitly internationalist groups should not be seen as evidence of the lack of resistance to the war. Mobilization for war is never purely ideological or voluntary. It requires discipline, coercion, fear, propaganda, legal coercion and population control. Conscientious objection, desertion, disobedience within the military, refusal to produce war, social exhaustion, strikes and hostility to the state can all weaken the war effort without being consciously and explicitly internationalist. The political question is how such refusals can be transformed into a class negation of capitalist war and all nation states, rather than being absorbed by pacifism, democratic humanitarianism, nationalism or the rival camp.
The texts collected in our publication should not be read as immutable doctrine, but as contextual attempts to formulate a class response to moments in which proletarians have been drawn into national, anti-fascist, democratic or anti-imperialist mobilizations. Each case returns to the same problem from a different historical perspective.
The first approach is particularly evident in the reaction of Japanese anarchists to the invasion of Manchuria in 1931. The Japanese Libertarian Federation wrote from inside the attacking imperialist country. Their first target was the Japanese state itself, its army, its capitalist class, and the patriotic rhetoric used to justify the invasion. The fatherland does not appear in this text as a community of the exploited and their exploiters. Rather, it is understood as the political form in which the poor are required to endure hunger, cold and death while the ruling class gains profit and power.
What is crucial here is that the condemnation of Japanese imperialism does not translate into support for the opposing national camp. The Japan Libertarian Federation asks who would benefit if Japanese influence were pushed out of China by a national liberation movement victory. Her answer was clear. What would benefit from this would not be the Chinese workers and farmers as an autonomous social force, but rather the emerging Chinese bourgeoisie and the foreign capitals that competed with Japan for influence and markets. This already shows an early form of the double refusal, which is elaborated even more sharply in the later texts of our publication.
The text explicitly refers to Kropotkin's stance in 1914. At that time he supported the Entente because he considered German militarism to be the greater danger. The Japanese anarchists saw this as a fatal mistake. As soon as one imperialism is considered bad enough to justify supporting another, internationalism has already been absorbed into the logic of interstate war. The problem lies in the acceptance of a framework within which proletarians are asked to consider which ruling class should prevail over another.
The Union Communiste further developed the same question in a more systematic communist form during the Sino-Japanese War of 1937. The experience in Spain had already created the framework for this: the Popular Front had shown that “critical” support for the democratic bourgeoisie meant strengthening the apparatus that crushed the workers of Barcelona in May 1937 and eliminated forces - the POUM and the most radical anarchist currents - that did not want to subordinate themselves to the national democratic line. Your polemic against Trotsky is of central importance. Trotsky held that China, as a semi-colonial country attacked by Japan, was waging a progressive national war. Revolutionaries should support this war while maintaining their political independence from Chiang Kai-shek.
The Union Communiste rejected this distinction between military support and political independence. It wasn't about which side had been attacked. National defense is organized by the bourgeois state, its army and its political leadership. Supporting them therefore means strengthening the apparatus through which the working class is subjugated. In China, this meant strengthening the military and bureaucratic power of the Kuomintang and thus the bourgeois force that had crushed the workers' revolution of 1926-27. A state apparatus that is set up in the name of anti-imperialist war is not rendered harmless by describing the support given to it as “critical”. The discipline of national war transforms “critical support” into practical participation in the national war effort.
During World War II, the same problem resurfaced in the form of anti-fascism and the defense of the Soviet Union. This mass mobilization was the culmination of the political disarmament of the proletariat in the interwar period, in which the institutional integration of the working class into the democratic state through social democracy and the Stalinist politics of the popular fronts, which transformed class struggle into an anti-fascist defense of bourgeois democracy, had already undermined any basis for class autonomy. For most of the left, the war was portrayed as a battle between fascism and democracy, or as a war in which the USSR had to be defended in the face of Stalinism. By this point, the internationalist groups had renounced not only Stalinism, but also the Trotskyist position that Russia, as a degenerate workers' state, had to be defended against imperialism. This is a logic that ultimately contributed to the subordination of the proletarian masses worldwide to the Allied imperialist camp. The internationalist minorities in occupied Europe tried to take a different position.The Revolutionary Communists of Germany (RKD), the Groupe Révolutionnaire Prolétarien/Union des Communistes Internationalistes (GRP/UCI), left-communist factions and the anarchist network around André Arru, which operated from Marseille and Toulouse, rejected National Socialism and the German occupation, but also Allied imperialism, Stalinism, national resistance fronts based on class collaboration, and the restoration of the capitalist order under the guise of “liberation”. These groups produced illegal leaflets in German and French, addressed German soldiers as proletarians in uniform and not as mere tools of the Nazi state, and called for fraternization, desertion, refusal of discipline and fight against all states. They attempted to shatter the war's imposed national cohesion by politically intervening in the ranks of the army itself.
And of course this did not mean a denial of the reality of the German occupation or Nazi terror. Rather, it meant refusing to translate this reality into support for the Allied camp, the patriotic resistance, or the Soviet state. Some militants were arrested, deported or killed. Karl Fischer of the RKD survived Nazi repression, only to be kidnapped by the Soviet apparatus after the war and taken to the Gulag.
This tendency was not absent in the Greek context either. The current around Aghis Stinas maintained an internationalist position throughout the occupation – in its successive organizational forms – within occupied Greece. She turned against both the Axis powers and the Allied camp and also against the EAM/ELAS course for national unity, which she understood as the subordination of the working class to Allied imperialism. The internationalist position was therefore not limited to the metropolises of Western Europe. It was also maintained under conditions of extreme repression in a country where the pressure for national unity was among the strongest anywhere.2
In the Italian context, the strikes of March 1943 in Turin, Milan and the northern industrial centers showed that a real rupture in the working class could emerge within the aggressor state, driven by hunger, exhaustion and hatred of fascist discipline. But this break was later incorporated into the framework of anti-fascist national liberation, primarily through the PCI and the CLN, the cross-class coalition of national liberation that united communists, Christian democrats and even monarchists. The texts in our collection, written by groups in Great Britain and occupied France in connection with the Italian constellation, describe this situation almost unanimously, although there was no exchange between the groups. Berneri's texts refuse to equate Allied bombing with liberation. Instead, she contrasts the bombings with the strikes and sabotage actions of workers in Italy, thereby revealing that they were a means of enforcing the capitalist “order”. The texts of the communist left attack the same process as a preventive counter-revolution aimed at restoring the capitalist order through anti-fascism and nationalism. What the framework of national liberation suppressed was the possibility that the workers' revolt against fascism and war would have crossed the boundaries of anti-fascist state building and turned into a class struggle.
In France, the “liberation” of Paris in 1944 briefly raised the question of whether these internationalist minorities could connect with a broader workers’ movement. Militants from the GRP/UCI and the RKD took part in the strike committee at Renault. For a brief moment, the expectation of a new revolutionary wave was not unreasonable. But this opening quickly closed again. The Stalinist influence in the workplace, the restoration of state order and the stabilization brought about by the Allied armies limited the possibilities. Groups that had maintained an internationalist position through years of repression lacked the foothold or size to shape the situation when an opening briefly presented itself. Theoretical clarity alone cannot produce broader power; This depends on the degree of class organization, the breakdown of military discipline, the weakening of state legitimacy and the possibility of combining isolated resistance into a common movement.
War Commentary in Great Britain did not operate under German occupation, but within one of the victorious democratic imperialist states. Internationalism is not only tested under dictatorship or occupation. It is also put to the test within democracy when the democratic state demands work discipline, censorship, military obedience and silence in the name of the anti-fascist war effort. The anarchists around War Commentary argued that Britain was not waging a freedom struggle against fascism. It was an imperialist state that defended colonies, markets, trade routes and its global position. The anti-fascist war was a capitalist war. The demand that workers support the war effort meant their inclusion in the discipline of the state.
This is precisely why their attempts to reach the soldiers were so important. War Commentary addressed the troops not as part of a supposedly neutral national institution, but as a mass of workers in uniform, subject to discipline but still capable of discussion, discontent and revolt. Through soldiers' correspondence, the Forces Newsletter and references to previous mutinies and soldiers' councils, the publication attempted to open communication within the armed forces themselves. Their prosecution in 1945 for conspiring to cause discontent in the armed forces demonstrated the limits of democratic tolerance at the very moment when the war was ending and demobilization threatened to make soldiers once again an unpredictable social force. The danger was not that of an imminent military revolt, but that returning soldiers—workers in uniform who would soon re-enter workplaces, streets, and housing disputes3—could carry discontent back into civilian life. War Commentary's attempt to address them as thinking proletarians rather than as obedient military subjects therefore touched on a real fault line in the transition from the wartime to the postwar order.
However, the colonial question revealed a limit within this milieu. Albert Meltzer's 1942 text on national independence continued to allow for the possibility that struggles for national independence could, under certain conditions, take on a progressive character. This shows a difficulty that arises again and again: How can one fight one's own imperialist state and at the same time support the struggle of the colonized people without thereby supporting political nationalist movements that merely reproduce class rule under a different flag?
In the colonial context itself, Ngo Van's depiction of Vietnam in the period immediately after World War II is of great importance because it makes this difficulty brutally concrete. His perspective was based on the direct experience of French colonialism, Japanese occupation, the collapse of Japanese rule, British intervention, the return of the French and the rise of the Viet Minh. In 1945, there was a brief moment during the power vacuum that resulted from the Japanese withdrawal when workers and poor peasants acted independently. In the Hongay-Campha mines, workers took control of production and formed councils. In Saigon, independent committees and internationalist militants of the left-wing opposition made demands for weapons, workers' control and land for the peasants and formed popular committees. These movements were suppressed not only by the colonial troops, but also by the Viet Minh. The murder of left-wing opposition militants was no coincidence. Rather, it corresponded to the logic of national liberation as a process of state formation, within which those forces that could not be subordinated to the new national authority had to be eliminated.
Writing later, in 1968 and during the Vietnam War, Ngo Van did not downplay the violence of US imperialism. However, he refused to use this violence as a reason to support the Ho Chi Minh state. He took the position that Vietnamese workers and farmers had nothing to gain from either American capitalism or the state capitalism of North Vietnam. National liberation was understood as a change of rulers. The colonial administration may leave, but exploitation is being reorganized by a national bureaucracy, the party-state and the emerging domestic ruling class. His assessment turned out to be completely correct.
In Vietnam, the danger that support for a national war would lead to the establishment of a state capitalist regime was no longer a theoretical prediction. It had already become a historical experience. The national movement had shown that, in order to monopolize state power, it would destroy autonomous initiatives of the proletariat and peasants. Ngo Van's criticism of national liberation, therefore, did not arise from indifference to colonial rule, but from the experience of a struggle in which the anti-colonial war had been transformed into the formation of a new state power against the very social forces that it was supposed to represent.
The Vietnam War in the 1960s sheds a different light on the analysis of anti-war mobilizations and the insubordination of soldiers. America's military failure was not simply defeat on the battlefield, but the result of widespread class insubordination. Resistance within the army and American society significantly weakened the ability of the American state to continue the war. Soldiers deserted, distributed underground newspapers for GIs, refused to serve in combat, and attacked officers (this practice went so far as to attack officers with hand grenades. It was called fragging at the time). At the same time, military discipline collapsed while the conscripted working class became increasingly exhausted. This resistance did not crystallize into a proletarian internationalist movement; he remained largely pacifist, democratic and generally anti-imperialist. Nevertheless, he shows that a broader refusal to war can acquire material significance even if the explicit internationalism of the “third camp” remains a minority. The crucial question is how such refusals can be politically clarified and connected without being co-opted by liberal pacifism, by support for the opposing camp, or by an anti-imperialism that leaves the class character of the opposing forces unexamined.
In this context, the Paris Manifesto of Arab and Israeli Communists from 1976 is of particular importance. It opposes the uncritical positions on national liberation that are widespread today and, published in the magazine Khamsin, develops a simultaneous criticism of Zionism, the Israeli state, the Arab regimes, the Palestinian national organizations and the imperialist forces active in the region. The Israeli state is analyzed as a Zionist capitalist state based on mass expulsion, military rule and brutal violence against the Palestinian population. At the same time, it examines how Jewish workers are involved in national defense as well as in the nationalist and expansionist Zionist project. Today the course of militarism they criticized has escalated into genocide. At the same time, Israeli Jewish workers are not reduced to a mere extension of the state. Class conflicts, wildcat strikes, internal hierarchies and social discontent were still a reality within Israeli society at the time and remained politically relevant. The balance of class power is different today, and reactionary nationalist ideologies have gained much greater weight. This applies not only to Israel, but to the entire region and also internationally.
The manifesto's criticism of Palestinian nationalism is not subordinate to its criticism of Zionism. It rejects both the state-oriented strategy of the PLO and the negative alternative that rejected any compromise in the name of total national liberation and the destruction of the State of Israel. These positions differed tactically, but proceeded from the same political perspective: the organization of the Palestinian proletarians as a national people, represented by political and military leaderships. Emancipation cannot be equated with the establishment of a state, the victory of a national army, or the diplomatic recognition of a national leadership. The position of the comrades was clear. A Palestinian state could remove one of Arab nationalism's pretexts and directly confront Palestinian workers with their own ruling class. However, it would not represent their emancipation.
Peace between states or between a state and quasi-state actors is not the opposite of war. Rather, it is a reorganization of the same reality. Borders, security arrangements, policing, diplomatic recognition, management of populations, reconstruction and new forms of incorporation into national economies remain. In this sense, peace continues the class content of war by other means. It does not eliminate the forces that gave rise to the conflict, but can stabilize their relationships and redistribute their respective roles.
This dynamic can also be transferred to the present without it being anachronistic. Temporary agreements, ceasefires, prisoner or hostage exchanges, reconstruction mechanisms, and security guarantees may be acceptable to actors such as Hamas, Iran, Qatar, Israel, and the United States, each for their own reasons and within the framework of their respective strategies. However, such agreements cannot be equated with the interests of the Palestinian proletarians. They regulate the conditions under which Palestinians continue to be governed, policed, displaced, confined, kept employed or unemployed, dependent on aid, or even killed en masse.
The last contribution to our collection, Arya Zahedi's text on Iran, locates the criticism of anti-imperialist camp thinking in the present. The Iranian state's conflict with the United States, Israel or the West is once again used by such “anti-imperialists” as sufficient reason to ignore its class nature, its brutal repression of class and social struggles, and its role in capitalist domination in West Asia. The Islamic Republic uses external conflict to violently impose internal discipline: to suppress strikes, crush the women's movement, impose austerity measures, police morale, repress minorities, and portray social struggle as treason at a time of national emergency. This is not a phenomenon unique to Iran. Every state uses external threats to demand internal unity. What is special today is that parts of the international left accept this logic when the state in question confronts the United States, Israel or the West - with the state's war effort being reinterpreted as "resistance" - without the fig leaf of the state's socialist character or a "third way" to socialism, as was the case in the past.
The result is predictable: workers, women, migrants, minorities and prisoners fighting the regime disappear from view when bombs fall. The state's war efforts are reinterpreted as "resistance" and those it exploits and oppresses are pushed into the background. Conflict with stronger imperialism does not transform a state into an agent of emancipation. It simply makes the state more effective internally, as dissent can be criminalized as treason.
This problem is not limited to the old left with its forms of Stalinism, social democracy, patriotic anti-fascism or classic anti-imperialist campism. It can also be found in movements that see themselves as radical criticism of traditional Marxism.
These currents should not be equated with one another. The theory of communization, the critique of value, Marxism influenced by Postone, the legacy of the Frankfurt School and anti-German politics have different origins and often lead to opposite political conclusions. Nevertheless, certain variants of these currents share a common tendency. The proletariat appears to be so completely integrated into capital that it can no longer be thought of as a contradictory subject of a communist transformation.
Théorie Communiste (TC)'s approach is more subtle. TC does not simply reproduce a theory of the complete subsumption of the proletariat under capital. However, TC also does not locate the communist abolition in a possible constitution of the working class as a class in itself. Within TC, any positive autonomy or self-assertion of the proletariat continues to be seen as an affirmation of a pole of the capital relationship and thus as a limit that must be overcome. The problem is that once autonomous class activity is reduced to such a limit, the transition beyond the capital relation can no longer arise through the development and generalization of that activity itself. Rather, it is structurally located in the transformation of class relations. The decisive factors here are the increasing superfluousness of labor for valorization and the growing separation between the reproduction of the proletarians and the valorization of their labor power. The abolition of the proletariat therefore appears less than a possible result of its contradictory self-activity. Rather, it appears as the result of a contradiction brought about by capital itself. This ultimately turns class membership into an external constraint that is abolished by the communizing measures of a population whose constitution as a class has become impossible.
Our criticism of these positions does not mean retreating to a nostalgic, workerist cult of work and the factory. The communist horizon does not consist in the self-assertion of the proletariat as a class within capitalism, but in the abolition of capital as a social relationship and thus in the abolition of the proletariat as such. The problem begins where the necessary criticism of the self-assertion of the proletariat turns into a theoretical exclusion of the possibility that the class can change itself through its own struggles. If the proletariat is understood exclusively as completely subsumed under capital, as integrated into a “totally managed society” or even only as one pole of the capital relationship, then the possibility of rupture tends to be shifted to another place.
Sometimes it is applied to surplus populations, migrants, racialized subjects, the absolutely excluded, or to an indeterminate figure of resistance such as the “barbarians.” Sometimes it is applied to national liberation movements, whose class content remains unexamined. In other cases, particularly in certain anti-German milieus, this shift occurs in the opposite direction. It leads to the defense of an existing state, namely Israel, as a supposed barrier against anti-Semitic barbarism.
The development of the anti-German current is a case in which the original insight already contained the seeds of its later development. In fact, there had been a tendency in parts of the German left to treat anti-Semitism and the Holocaust as if simply speaking generally about fascism, capitalism or imperialism was enough to grasp their concrete historical form.
The anti-Germans responded by detaching this historical form from class relations, the capitalist state, and the material history of imperialist violence. The result was not a dialectical definition of anti-Semitism as a specific moment within the capitalist totality. Instead, this peculiarity was elevated to a political exception. Anti-Semitism is not simply one racism among others, nor is the Holocaust just one state massacre among others. Neither can be understood as a singularity that cannot be further deduced and is detached from the capitalist social totality from which the modern state, racialization, imperialist competition and annihilative nationalism emerged. The anti-German mistake therefore did not lie in the later support of Israel, the United States or NATO. It was already in the form of the original correction itself. Instead of determining the particularity from the totality, the particularity was increasingly opposed to the totality.
From this point, Israel was stripped of its concrete social reality as a capitalist state with its own class relations, nationalist violence and geopolitical function and instead elevated to the privileged bearer of historical memory and anti-fascist reason. The defense of Israel seamlessly transitioned into an apology for the power of the USA and NATO, which was now coded as a defense of civilization against anti-Semitic barbarism.
This is not a minor departure from the original criticism. It is its reductio ad absurdum: the critical theory of total integration, taken to its extreme point of consequence, produces an uncritical support of the existing power relations. This development must be named and described precisely because it shows how completely the displacement of emancipation from the class relationship can turn the original political intention into the opposite.
The political consequences of TC's conception become clearer in her exchanges with Minassian about the Gaza Strip.4 In its analysis of the situation in Gaza, TC correctly recognizes the fragmentation of the Palestinian proletariat and its emergence as a “surplus population.” Rather, the problem lies in what TC understands by autonomous class activity. For TC, proletarian self-organization remains a self-assertion of the class within the capital relationship and thus a limit that must be overcome. Since self-organization means that the class acts strictly as such, it can itself take national or other forms of incorporation. This blurs the distinction between self-organization and class autonomy. Autonomy then no longer refers to a tendency within the struggle through which proletarians come into conflict with the forms that organize them as a class of capital. Instead, it is treated as the search for a supposedly pure class activity that is divorced from these regulations. Hence the accusation of “conceptual purity” towards attempts to identify autonomous tendencies within the struggles of the Palestinian population. The result is paradoxical. If nationalist self-organization is accepted as the actual form of proletarian struggle, while the attempt to determine the antagonistic contradictions running through this struggle is suspected as an expression of an abstract purity, then the "available banners" of national or religious proto-states threaten to become the practically inescapable forms of struggle.This is precisely why the real struggles and material frictions against Hamas as the ruling bureaucracy lose their independent political significance.
The implications of this position extend beyond TC's own analysis. Politically, it encounters a broader “anti-imperialist” left that defends this national border with great ferocity and defames the very idea of solidarity across national borders – or any attempt to frame the conflict in class rather than national terms – as an expression of a “colonialist mindset” or “liberal Zionism”.
Ultimately, this approach treats the capitalist apparatus of national liberation as an insurmountable frontier of struggle, thereby abandoning the internationalist position to the logic of the lesser evil.
Supporting the Palestinian national resistance and supporting the Israeli state obviously produce different political outcomes. Beneath these obviously different policy implications, however, lies a related theoretical shift. Emancipation is no longer located in the contradictory struggles of the proletariat against its own capitalist constitution. Instead, transformative activity tends to be sought either in the terms under which the class is currently organized, in other privileged figures of negativity, or outside of proletarian self-activity altogether. In their place then comes the oppressed nation, the excluded subject, the identity that has become a victim, the abstract negativity or a state that claims to defend civilization against barbarism.
Our starting point is different. It does not presuppose a naive belief in a ready-made revolutionary subject. The proletariat is not revolutionary because it is pure, outside of capital or already aware of its task. It matters because it is produced by capital and disciplined by capital and yet is capable in struggle of interrupting the reproduction of the relationship that it itself constitutes. The problem cannot be solved by allowing the integration of the proletariat into capital to exhaust the political significance of its struggles. It is not about replacing the old affirmative worker subject with another, purified figure of negativity. This means, for example, the so-called “abjects”, surplus populations or a structural mechanism that is assumed to bring about the break from within. Rather, it is about working through, practically and theoretically, the contradictory refusals that arise within capitalist social relations themselves.
That brings us back to Vietnam. The history of the Vietnam War is important not because it provides a repeatable model. It is important because it makes visible the terrain on which internationalist intervention must begin. War denial almost always begins in confused, partial and non-programmatic forms. But it is precisely this space of spontaneous resistance that forms the material basis for a proletarian-internationalist break with the national war machine.
This brings us back to the question with which we began: Why has such spontaneous resistance only rarely condensed into a mass outbreak that would be comparable to the development between 1917 and 1920? To answer this question, we must look beyond ideological defeat. The absence of a comparable internationalist wave in the following decades was the result of a profound structural shift. The material “organizational density” that had made mutinies, fraternizations and the emergence of the council form possible was systematically eliminated. On the one hand, autonomous forms of class organization were physically destroyed or rendered harmless through their institutional integration into the state apparatus. This happened through the bureaucratization of the trade unions, social democracy and Stalinism. On the other hand, the composition of the class itself has changed fundamentally. Successive waves of capitalist restructuring, deindustrialization, and the dissolution of closed worker milieus and communities have eroded the old material basis of collective action. The problem today is not simply to revive the organizational models of 1917. Rather, it is about how today's refusal of war can acquire class content and become a material force within the structurally fragmented reality of the contemporary proletariat.
European rearmament makes this problem particularly urgent today. The governments talk about defense preparedness and national defense. But the willingness to fight is not simply available to the state. It must first be brought about through fear, discipline, propaganda, border regimes, conscription laws and punishments. The political will for war, understood as mass voluntary identification with national military projects, is remarkably weak in Europe today. Ukraine is the clearest indication of this. Forced conscription, widespread draft evasion, and the social tensions created by the costs of war are diametrically opposed to the myth of a population united behind the flag. This does not mean that Ukrainian workers and soldiers have taken an internationalist proletarian position, at least not in an organized form. However, the gap between what the state needs and what the population is willing to endure represents a real break. It is precisely these breaks that we have to work with.
Ultimately, the story we have covered here leads to a practical problem rather than a completed conclusion. Under what conditions can the internationalist position intervene in the real fault lines of war mobilization and help transform them into a class break with the state, the nation and the capitalist organization of life? These breaks are not immediately revolutionary. They can be captured by pacifism or campism. This can be seen, for example, in the contested political significance of the mobilizations of dock workers against arms deliveries. Without such breaks, however, the “third point of view” remains an abstract formula.
Antithesi, (June 21 – August 11, 2026){{}}
Texts from the published anthology
Japanese Libertarian Federation, “What To Do About War?”, Jiyu Rengo Shinbun, No. 64, November 1931; originally published in Esperanto; English translation by John Crump, reprinted in Anarchist Opposition to War, Seattle: Charlatan Stew, 1995. (https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/japanese-libertarian-federation…)
Union Communiste, "En face le conflict Sino-Japonais", L'Internationale, No. 31, October 3, 1937. (https://archivesautonomies.org/spip.php?article5995"class="spip_url spip_out auto" rel="nofollow external">https://archivesautonomies.org/spip.php?article5995)
Editorial group of "War Commentary", "War and Resistance", War Commentary, Vol. 1, No. 1, November 1939. (https://archivesautonomies.org/spip.php?article6258"class="spip_url spip_out auto" rel="nofollow external">https://archivesautonomies.org/spip.php?article6258)
Editorial group of "War Commentary", "The Third Choice", War Commentary, Vol. 1, No. 10, August 1940. (https://archivesautonomies.org/spip.php?article6289"class="spip_url spip_out auto" rel="nofollow external">https://archivesautonomies.org/spip.php?article6289)
Les Communistes Révolutionnaires / The Revolutionary Communists, "Ouvriers! Soldiers! / Workers! Soldiers!", bilingual leaflet in French and German, July 1942. (https://archivesautonomies.org/spip.php?article5300"class="spip_url spip_out auto" rel="nofollow external">https://archivesautonomies.org/spip.php?article5300)
The Revolutionary Communists, "German Soldiers! Comrades!", leaflet in German, occupied France, September 1942; the German original is printed in: Philippe Bourrinet, The 'Bordigist' Current (1912–1952), Editoriale Fondazione Amadeo Bordiga, 2013.
Groupe Révolutionnaire Prolétarien, “Quelques Thèses”, newsletter of the Groupe Révolutionnaire Prolétarien, March 1943. (https://www.archivesautonomies.org/IMG/pdf/gauchecommuniste/internationa...class="spip_url spip_out auto" rel="nofollow external">https://www.archivesautonomies.org/IMG/pdf/gauchecommuniste/internationa...)
Groupe Révolutionnaire Prolétarien, “La situation politique en France”, Bulletin of the Groupe Révolutionnaire Prolétarien, March 1943. (https://www.archivesautonomies.org/IMG/pdf/gauchecommuniste/internationa...class="spip_url spip_out auto" rel="nofollow external">https://www.archivesautonomies.org/IMG/pdf/gauchecommuniste/internationa...)
Groupe Révolutionnaire Prolétarien, "Position du prolétariat révolutionnaire à l'égard de l'Allemagne", Bulletin of the Groupe Révolutionnaire Prolétarien, March 1943. (https://www.archivesautonomies.org/IMG/pdf/gauchecommuniste/internationa...class="spip_url spip_out auto" rel="nofollow external">https://www.archivesautonomies.org/IMG/pdf/gauchecommuniste/internationa...)
Groupe Révolutionnaire Prolétarien, “Position du prolétariat révolutionnaire à l'égard de la Russie,” Bulletin of the Groupe Révolutionnaire Prolétarien, March 1943. (https://www.archivesautonomies.org/IMG/pdf/gauchecommuniste/internationa...class="spip_url spip_out auto" rel="nofollow external">https://www.archivesautonomies.org/IMG/pdf/gauchecommuniste/internationa...)
Communistes Révolutionnaires, “Appel aux ouvriers juifs,” Fraternization Prolétarienne, No. 3, April 1943. (http://archivesautonomies.org/spip.php?article1545"class="spip_url spip_out auto" rel="nofollow external">http://archivesautonomies.org/spip.php?article1545)
Fédération Internationale Syndicaliste Révolutionnaire, “Tous les travailleurs intellectuels et manuals,” leaflet printed in Toulouse, 1943; written in Marseille by Jean Solier, alias André Arru, Voline and companions. (https://archivesautonomies.org/IMG/pdf/anarchismes/2eguerre/anarchistes-...class="spip_url spip_out auto" rel="nofollow external">https://archivesautonomies.org/IMG/pdf/anarchismes/2eguerre/anarchistes-...)
Marie-Louise Berneri, "The 'Liberation' of Italy: Bombs will do the Job," War Commentary, Vol. 4, No. 16, mid-June 1943. (https://archivesautonomies.org/IMG/pdf/nonfrenchpublications/english/war...class="spip_url spip_out auto" rel="nofollow external">https://archivesautonomies.org/IMG/pdf/nonfrenchpublications/english/war...)
Albert Meltzer, “Patriotism,” War Commentary, Vol. 4, No. 15, June 1943. (https://archivesautonomies.org/IMG/pdf/nonfrenchpublications/english/war...class="spip_url spip_out auto" rel="nofollow external">https://archivesautonomies.org/IMG/pdf/nonfrenchpublications/english/war...)
Fédération Internationale Syndicaliste Révolutionnaire, “Mort Aux Vaches”, poster, Toulouse, August 1943. (https://placard.ficedl.info/article9268.html?lang=fr"class="spip_url spip_out auto" rel="nofollow external">https://placard.ficedl.info/article9268.html?lang=fr)
Marie-Louise Berneri, "British Bombing," War Commentary, Vol. 4, No. 21, September 1943. (https://archivesautonomies.org/spip.php?article5557"class="spip_url spip_out auto" rel="nofollow external">https://archivesautonomies.org/spip.php?article5557)
Union des Communistes Internationalistes, “Contre la guerre impérialiste, révolution socialiste!”, Le Réveil Prolétarien, No. 1, October 1943. (https://archivesautonomies.org/spip.php?article1488"class="spip_url spip_out auto" rel="nofollow external">https://archivesautonomies.org/spip.php?article1488)
Marie-Louise Berneri, “War and Fascism,” War Commentary, Vol. 5, No. 4, mid-December 1943. (https://archivesautonomies.org/spip.php?article6416"class="spip_url spip_out auto" rel="nofollow external">https://archivesautonomies.org/spip.php?article6416)
Anarchist Federation, “Manifesto of the Anarchist Federation on War,” War Commentary, Vol. 5, No. 4, mid-December 1943. (https://archivesautonomies.org/spip.php?article6417"class="spip_url spip_out auto" rel="nofollow external">https://archivesautonomies.org/spip.php?article6417)
GRP-UCI / Union des Communistes Internationalistes, "Pourquoi des Conseils d'usine?", Le Réveil Prolétarien, No. 6, March 1944. (https://archivesautonomies.org/spip.php?article1497"class="spip_url spip_out auto" rel="nofollow external">https://archivesautonomies.org/spip.php?article1497)
GRP-UCI / Union des Communistes Internationalistes, “L'armée 'rouge' et la classe ouvrière", Le Réveil Prolétarien, No. 7, April 1944. (https://archivesautonomies.org/spip.php?article1498"class="spip_url spip_out auto" rel="nofollow external">https://archivesautonomies.org/spip.php?article1498)
"Manifeste aux prolétaires d'Europe", Bulletin International de Discussion de la Gauche communiste italienne, June 1944. (https://archivesautonomies.org/spip.php?article2086"class="spip_url spip_out auto" rel="nofollow external">https://archivesautonomies.org/spip.php?article2086)
Fraction Française de la Gauche Communiste, "Éditorial", L'Étincelle, No. 0, August 1944. (https://archivesautonomies.org/IMG/pdf/gauchecommuniste/internationalist...class="spip_url spip_out auto" rel="nofollow external">https://archivesautonomies.org/IMG/pdf/gauchecommuniste/internationalist...)
Fraction Française de la Gauche Communiste, “Résolution sur les movements nationalistes”, Internationalisme, No. 1, January 1945. (https://archivesautonomies.org/spip.php?article1690"class="spip_url spip_out auto" rel="nofollow external">https://archivesautonomies.org/spip.php?article1690)
Antithesi, “Ngo Van: The Imperialist Slaughterhouse and Class Autonomy in Vietnam in 1945,” in 100 Years Against Every Camp: Proletarian Internationalism, War and Revolution, Antithesi, June 2026. (Based primarily onhttps://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ngo-van-in-the-crossfire"class="spip_url spip_out auto" rel="nofollow external">https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ngo-van-in-the-crossfire)
Solidarity, "News from Zengakuren", Solidarity. For Workers' Power, Vol. 2, No. 5, July 1962; contains an excerpt from the Zengakuren newsletter, No. 3. (https://libcom.org/article/solidarity-workers-power-205"class="spip_url spip_out auto" rel="nofollow external">https://libcom.org/article/solidarity-workers-power-205)
Ngo Van, “Sur la réforme agraire”, Cahiers de discussion pour le socialisme de conseils, No. 8, April 1968. (https://archivesautonomies.org/spip.php?article4728"class="spip_url spip_out auto" rel="nofollow external">https://archivesautonomies.org/spip.php?article4728)
Ngo Van, "Reflections preliminaires sur la guerre du Vietnam", Cahiers de discussion pour le socialisme de conseils, No. 8, April 1968. (https://archivesautonomies.org/spip.php?article4613"class="spip_url spip_out auto" rel="nofollow external">https://archivesautonomies.org/spip.php?article4613)
Mustapha Khayati, Lafif Lakhdar et al., “Address aux prolétaires et aux jeunes révolutionnaires Arabes et Israelis contre la guerre et pour la révolution prolétarienne,” May 1976; Supplement in Khamsin, No. 3; partially reprinted in Jeune Taupe, No. 10, July 1976. Signatories include Hakima Berada, Mustapha Khayati, Maroine Dib, Kamal Lahbadi, Dany Diner, Lafif Lakhdar, Avishai Ehrlich, Eli Lobel, Abdul-Kader El-Janaby, Moshé Machover, Mikhal Marouane, Emir Harbi, Moshe Speier, Lea Horowitz, Khalil Toama and Abdallah Zannan; Later signatories: Ayed Nagib, Mohamed Cheret and Khaldoun Abou El-Wafa. (https://situationnisteblog.com/2020/05/25/5368/"class="spip_url spip_out auto" rel="nofollow external">https://situationnisteblog.com/2020/05/25/5368/)
Arya Zahedi, "The Anti-Imperialist Imperialism Club: On Left Internationalism and Iran.", Heatwave, No. 2, Fall 2025, PM Press. (https://libcom.org/article/anti-imperialist-imperialism-club-left-intern...class="spip_url spip_out auto" rel="nofollow external">https://libcom.org/article/anti-imperialist-imperialism-club-left-intern...), also in German:https://panopticon.noblogs.org/post/2026/01/16/der-antiimperialistische-...class="spip_url spip_out auto" rel="nofollow external">https://panopticon.noblogs.org/post/2026/01/16/der-antiimperialistische-...
Footnotes
1. Marie Louise Berneri, Neither East Nor West: Selected Writings, Freedom Press, London, 1952. We would particularly like to thank our comrades in Paris for the conversations that helped initiate this project: for bringing Berneri's writings into our discussions and for bringing our attention to the relationship between Henry Chazé and Henri Simon. We are particularly grateful for the work currently being done on their correspondence, which has piqued our curiosity and encouraged us to pursue these connections further.
2. However, this political current should not be viewed in isolation from the broader social terrain of occupied Greece. The first waves of strikes, demonstrations and collective actions in Athens did not emerge from an already consolidated EAM apparatus. At the beginning of the occupation, the organizational apparatus of the Communist Party was badly damaged by dictatorship, imprisonment, exile and police infiltration. Many early struggles arose instead from the immediate material pressures of hunger, collapsing wages, soup kitchens, forced labor, hospital conditions, and the question of physical survival. In a number of cases, workers, employees, invalids of the Albanian front, tuberculosis sufferers and local committees acted before the EAM/EEAM leadership even hesitated, or even against their initial hesitation, but ultimately supported, coordinated and politically absorbed these initiatives. So it's not about counteracting the organization with pure spontaneity. Rather, the Greek case shows how EAM hegemony emerged through a process of intervention in struggles that originally preceded it. What later appeared to be a unified national liberation movement contained within itself a more uneven history of social self-activity: company initiatives, hospital committees, hunger protests and strikes that emanated from the concrete reproduction of workers' lives under occupation. The internationalist criticism of the current around Stinas gains some of its significance against this background.She insisted that these social fractures should not be subordinated to the reconstruction of a national front, whether under Allied auspices or under the political leadership of the EAM.
3. In the summer and autumn of 1946, faced with acute housing shortages, demobilization and post-war deprivation, tens of thousands of people - many of them former soldiers and their families - occupied empty military camps and later hotels and apartments across Great Britain. While the movement did not represent a revolutionary challenge to the state, it shows how soldiers' return to civilian life could become a source of social friction and direct action in the transition from the wartime to the postwar order.
4. Gaza 2024, Theorie Communiste 28, p. 101-138
This translation comes fromhttps://communaut.org/de/das-dreitte-lager-neu-betracht"class="spip_out" rel="external">communaut.org Read the full story at the source Source: de.indymedia
An English version can be found directly on the Athens group websitehttps://antithesi.gr"class="spip_out" rel="external">Antithesi: