Check out this link to a history of the Communist Party in South Africa provided by Gary Hicks:

http://www.sacp.org.za/pubs/acommunist/2011/issue184.pdf

This New Year’s Eve/ Day will mark 53 years since the Cuban people, led by their liberation movement today expressed in their Communist Party, the trade unions, the Joven Rebelde, the women’s organizations, the cultural organizations, and others……freed their country from the clutches of US imperialism. They have built a socialist society that has survived eleven US presidents whose aim of destroying that society has ranked near the top of their foreign policy objectives. They have been a force of example in the less-developed countries. The very existence of socialist Cuba is a powerful message: people do not have to live in poverty, miseducation, bad health and other conditions of inhumanity. The peoples of the world do not have to live this way!

In celebration of all this…below,
the link to the movie “The Buena Vista Social Club”. Enjoy, and pass the link on to others. And a Happy New Year of victorious struggle against capitalist barbarism.

Gary Hicks
Berkeley CA

http://www.hulu.com/watch/62618/buena-vista-social-club

CGTP-IN MESSAGE OF THANKS FOR INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY AND INFORMATION

AFTER THE 24TH NOVEMBER GENERAL STRIKE
THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES

With the workers’ participation in public and private workplaces, the immense attendance of demonstrations and rallies held on the day and the clear support of the public opinion, the 24 November general strike was a magnificent expression of strength and determination and a shining landmark in the struggle of the Portuguese men and women workers.
The general strike received solidarity greetings from dozens of trade union organisations from several continents and included solidarity events in front of Portuguese consulates abroad, all of these being important expressions of unity of purpose as well as internationalist and class-based solidarity which deeply honour us and stimulate the Portuguese workers and their necessary struggle.
A struggle which – given the dimension and depth of the current offensive – needs to be intensified: to defend alternative paths and historical rights and gains; to value labour and the workers; for a future with rights for the new generations; for the development of the productive fabric; to defend democracy and national sovereignty.
While big economic and financial groups continue to get fat and to be spared, the government and the troika are seeking and provoking the general impoverishment of the population by intensifying workers’ exploitation: they wish to make unfair dismissals become legitimate, confronting Portugal’s Constitution; cut back redundancy pay; reduce unemployment benefits and ostracise the unemployed; to attack collective bargaining, trade unions and the right to negotiate; to rob Christmas and holiday bonus pay from workers and pensioners; violently raise taxes and prices of essential services and commodities; severely cut in health, education and social welfare; dismantle public services and privatise strategic companies and industries.
This is why, in Portugal, in the workplaces and on the streets the struggles of workers, unemployed, youth, women, pensioners and other popular layers – hit by the violent offensive – are repeatedly taking place.

12-17 DECEMBER – PROTEST AND STRUGGLE WEEK
AGAINST LONGER WORKING HOURS AND FORCED LABOUR
FOR JOBS, SALARIES AND RIGHTS
The government has just decided to raise the working week from 40 to 42,5 hours, creating a monthly ten-hour basket, with which they intend to force workers to work without pay one Saturday every month.
For companies to attain competitiveness they don’t need to increase working hours nor reduce salaries since, in Portugal, these two together only mean 15% of companies’ total expenditure. What is required is better organisation and management, higher added-value of the goods and services sold in the market, innovation and modernisation as well as fight against the underground economy.

THERE ARE ALTERNATIVES, LET US FIGHT FOR THEM!
FOR A PORTUGAL WITH A FUTURE!

Graciete Cruz
International Secretary
Executive Board
CGTP-IN

JCP CC 4th Plenum: ‘Two-party’ system is facing a collapse

Via: http://www.japan-press.co.jp/modules/news/index.php?id=2439

December 5, 2011

The Japanese Communist Party Central Committee held its 4th Plenum on December 3 and 4 at its head office in Tokyo.

On behalf of the Executive Committee, JCP Chair Shii Kazuo gave a report to the Plenum. First, he made clear the characteristics of the Noda Cabinet which has been brought about through the failures of his predecessors in the Democratic Party of Japan-led governments, Hatoyama Yukio and Kan Naoto. The course of these governments shows that the “two-party” system is facing a collapse, and Shii explained in detail that a new situation is emerging, which increases the possibility that people become aware of the real point of contention existing between the DPJ-LDP-Komei and the JCP.

The report states that the public quest for a new turn in politics will continue, and that cooperation between the JCP and all strata of people is increasing. The unprecedented experience of the major earthquake/tsunami disaster and the nuclear accident accelerated such moves toward cooperation. The report also states that this move led to JCP advances in the three disaster-hit prefectural assembly elections, and that a historical situation promising change is emerging in Okinawa Prefecture over the Futenma base issue. The report at the same time specifically refers to the maneuvers aimed at responding to the ongoing political impasse in a reactionary manner, and calls for struggling against these moves.

Shii summed up the present political situation in Japan as standing at a historical crossroads, and called on members to work hard to demonstrate the JCP’s true value as the party calling for social change.

Secondly, the report refers to the heightened movements of people in various fields and the JCP role in them. The report gives details of various reconstruction efforts from the major disaster and the nuclear disaster, struggles aimed at a Japan free of NPPs; struggles opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement and the Futenma base transfer; struggles against the plan to increase the consumption tax and adversely revise the social services system; demands to eliminate poverty and the widening income gaps by rehabilitating employment, household economy, and the national economy; and the struggle to reform the election system. The report calls for a rapid development of struggles to realize various demands by ways of a joint struggle on a single point of issue. The report also calls for increasing efforts to have the JCP position endorsed by a majority of the general public.

Shii, thirdly, reported on the upcoming general election. He called on all JCP organizations to work even harder in prefectures which fall short of gaining 5% of the votes cast for the JCP. He proposed putting up a JCP candidate in all single-seat constituencies and several candidates in all proportional representation blocs. He stated that with the proportional representation election at the center, the party will set a goal to receive more than 6.5 million votes or 10% of total votes, and to win more than one seat in all proportional representation blocs.

Fourthly, reporting on party buildup, Shii proposed achieving an increase in JCP membership by 50,000, the daily Akahata readership by 50,000, and the Akahata Sunday edition readership by 170,000.

Finally, Shii pointed out that the basis of the present monetary crisis lies on the overproduction crisis, and that the latter crisis is being greatly increased. The poverty rate and gaps between the rich and the poor are also increasing on a global scale. Under such circumstances, the works of Marx are gaining much attention from the world. Shii called on all JCP members to study more and talk more about a vision for change, which is indicated in the JCP Program and its interpretation of scientific socialism.

In the 4th CC Plenum, JCP candidates for the general election as well as in House of Councilors proportional representation elections were introduced. The Plenum was broadcast live throughout Japan via the Internet.

During the two-day session, 53 members of the Central Committee took the floor to respond to the Executive Committee’s report.

To conclude the discussions, Executive Committee Chair Shii Kazuo took the floor and encouraged all JCP members to analyze and comprehend the ongoing situation, the party election policy, and the party buildup effort as one package. Shii then stressed the need to prepare to bring the package into shape. Citizens’ movements are dramatically increasing in various fields, and behind the widespread cooperation between the JCP and the people involved in movements is the collapse of the support base for “the two- party system”. This collapse is offering a greater possibility to bring about a change in the power balance between political parties. Shii emphasized that the JCP should take advantage of this change to achieve a JCP advance. As for the election policy, he said that many people are expecting the JCP to field a candidate in all single-seat electoral districts. He argued that to overcome the difficulty in putting up a candidate in each district, it is necessary to increase the number of JCP members and strengthen the financial ground based on self-reliance and independence. Regarding the party buildup, he stated that all members should work to help realize public demands in tandem with the party buildup effort. He added that all members should also subscribe to the daily Akahata and make efforts to build a stronger party based on the decisions made by the Central Committee.

The Central Committee unanimously adopted the Executive Committee report and endorsed its conclusion. All the members of the Central Committee resolved to take a lead in discussing the Program and policies with all JCP members to help them to understand the decisions reached at the 4th CC Plenum. The Plenum was adjourned after pledging to make a success of the party buildup effort and achieve a JCP victory in the next general election.

Comrades –

Please join with me in a national Boycott of all Lowe’s family improvement stores for their bigotry against American Musims in withdrawing their advertising from the television reality show…“All-American Muslim”.

Thank you in behalf of all American Muslims.

James F. Harrington

“If you tremble with indignation at every injustice,
then you are a comrade of mine!”
~Che Guevara

by Zoltan Ziggedy

Via: http://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/2011/12/chinese-puzzle.html

Whither China? was the name of a widely circulated pamphlet authored by the respected Anglo-Indian Marxist author, R. Palme Dutt. Writing in 1966, with The People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the throes of the “Cultural Revolution”, the pamphlet sought to shed light on the PRC’s tortured road from liberation in 1949 to a vast upheaval disrupting all aspects of Chinese society as well as foreign relations. To most people – across the entire political spectrum—developments within this Asian giant were a challenge to understand. To be sure, there were zealots outside of the PRC who hung on every word uttered by The Great Helmsman, Chairman Mao, and stood by every release explaining Chinese events in the People’s Daily, Red Flag and Peking Review. A few Communist Parties and many middle-class intellectuals embraced the Cultural Revolution as a rite of purification. Yet for most, as with Palme Dutt, the paramount question remained: Where is the PRC going?

Today, forty-five years later, the question remains open.

The cultish followers of Mao have mostly gone on to their life’s work, though some still uncritically defend every aspect of Chinese Communist Party policies during Mao’s chairmanship.

But the PRC that we know today is a vastly different country from the country worrying R. Palme Dutt in 1966; yet it is one that is just as difficult to comprehend. In place of the economic stagnation of the Cultural Revolution period, the contemporary Chinese economy enjoys one of the highest consistent growth rates in the world and counts as an industrial giant well on its way to challenging the USA in annual national product. The economic autarky of the Mao period has been replaced with a massive effort to trade globally. And state enterprises and common land ownership are now eroded by private investment and private ownership. The PRC today has an abundance of millionaires and not too few billionaires, a fact that would violently offend the militants of the Cultural Revolution.

At the same time, the ruling party in the PRC is the Communist Party. Its theorists and ideologues insist that they are proceeding down a distinctive, deliberate road to socialism. Ironically the PRC is now the darling of many in the right wing of the anti-capitalist movement, embraced by those who defend the market mechanism and a gradualist, evolutionary approach to socialism.

Among those advocating socialism, the PRC constitutes a kind of laboratory for socialist policy, much the way the Soviet Union was regarded after 1917. Partisans of socialism sift through the massive literature, reports, and commentaries on the PRC to find evidence to support ideological positions. For the most part, conclusions are, at best, tentative and speculative. Comprehensive conclusions remain illusive to even the most elevated intellectual egos.

Yet the PRC is entirely too formidable of a factor in global political and economic affairs to ignore. Therefore, I offer some modest observations.

“China-bashing”

Wherever the PRC road leads, it remains a lightening rod to bourgeois politicians and, unfortunately, most labor leaders. To hide their own failings, they easily and often point to some Chinese policy that stands in the way of satisfying the interests of working people. In its crudest form and in its essence, it is vulgar anti-Communism. Exploiting the deeply ingrained collective hysteria of the Cold-War, crass leaders and class-compromised union bureaucrats invoke the words “Chinese Communists” and mass distraction ensues. China-bashing has replaced Soviet-bashing (and the once popular Japan-bashing when Japanese corporate power was on the upswing) as an easy and frequent diversion from the rapacious behavior of multi-national corporations.

Rather than blame US multi-nationals for the destruction of decent paying jobs in the US, leaders scapegoat the PRC. From 1999 until 2009, US multinationals added 2.9 million workers abroad while cutting 864,400 in the US, according to the Commerce Department. In 2009, these monopoly capitalist enterprises employed 23.1 million workers in the US against 10.8 million in other countries. Most overseas employees are in Europe with the Chinese holding only 943,900 jobs from US multi-nationals. Canada, Mexico, and the UK, on the other hand, account for over 3 million of multinational overseas employment.

These same multinational corporations have reduced capital investment spending in the US at a decade long annual rate of .2% while boosting capital investment overseas by an annual average of 4%.

These job shifts are corporate decisions based upon profit expectations and, according to the Commerce Department, “primarily to sell to local customers… rather to sell in the US market.” Thus, politicians and union leaders are hiding behind simplistic and self-serving demagogy in blaming China for the demise of US jobs. And their aversion to class struggle against US corporate giants masks the role of those corporations in taking jobs to where they can recover profits most easily; bogus patriotism obscures corporate fealty to the bottom line.

When pressed to put some meat on the bare bones of China-bashing, bourgeois economists cite the currency policies of the PRC. They argue that the relationship between the yuan and other currencies is consciously maintained at a lower-than-market level to increase the competitiveness of the Chinese export industries. But that argument has evaporated over the last year. Third quarter reports of PRC current-account surplus – a widely acknowledged measure of trade imbalance – show a dramatic decline from a year earlier; against the third quarter of 2010, the PRC current-account balance fell by 43.5%. Through the first three quarters of this year, PRC current-accounts surplus as a percentage of GDP fell from 5.1% last year to 3% currently. Ironically, at the November, 2010 G20 meeting, the US pressed hard to establish 4% or less current-accounts surplus/GDP as the benchmark for determining whether currencies were reasonably valued. With the PRC easily passing this test, the US has no argument. Nonetheless, US policy makers and pundits, including liberals, like Roubini and Krugman, continue to pound away at PRC currency policies.

When these current-account numbers are coupled with the continued high growth of the PRC (9.1% in the third quarter), they suggest that the PRC has made a significant shift from export growth to investment and consumption growth.

For the US left, the myths supporting China-bashing should be emphatically rebuffed. While the PRC policies internationally are generally self-interested – the PRC has seldom demonstrated the kind of international solidarity associated with twentieth century socialism—they are nonetheless independent of US imperialism. That is, the PRC operates to promote its own security and economic health. Where it clashes with US imperialism, for example, in UN votes against NATO aggression, progressives should applaud its role. At the same time, it shares many features with imperialism in its competition for markets, resources, and economic advantage in the global economy. These features often place it on the wrong side in its relations with other countries.

White Cat, Black stripes; Black Cat, White Stripes?

Much heat has been generated over the question of whether the PRC is socialist or capitalist. But from a Marxist perspective – like that of Palme Dutt – the telling question is not where it is, but where it’s going: Is the PRC on a path towards socialism or capitalism? Where is the process leading?

No one can deny that for decades, the PRC has allowed — indeed welcomed — capitalism in the front door. Foreign direct investment, joint-stock and private-stock enterprises, privatization, securitization, and acceptance of the market mechanism have all transformed the PRC economy into a prominent player in the global economy. This change has brought forth stunning growth for the country and a general rise in the Chinese standard of living, certainly from the stagnation of the period of the Cultural Revolution. In only a few decades, the PRC leadership has mounted a veritable revolution as profound as the sharp turns organized in Mao’s era.

At the same time, capitalism has brought with it nearly all of its ills: inequalities that rival history’s worse, a shattered health care system, working conditions that too often approach that of Dickens’ England, corruption, cronyism, unemployment, and a broken sense of collective fate or communal solidarity.

The entry of capitalist features into the PRC economy has plagued it with the maladies that arise from the anarchy of markets: imbalances, speculative fervor and bubbles, inflation, labor unrest, grey and black markets, and labor market chaos. In the spring and summer of 2010, workers rose against low wages and working conditions in many areas. Again, this year, there were significant actions for better pay, working conditions and against layoffs. In the fall, the PRC’s sovereign wealth fund was forced to buy shares in major Chinese banks. Despite the fact that private investors own a quarter or less of the country’s biggest banks, a sell-off by foreign investors caused a near panic met by the sovereign wealth funds’ intervention. Today, inflation, a construction bubble, and over reliance on exports weigh on the economy.

Despite these ugly aspects of the PRC’s flirtation with capitalism, the PRC negotiated the most tempestuous waves of the global economic crisis without the catastrophic damage incurred by the other economic powerhouses. In addition, most honest analysts, including even The Wall Street Journal, credit the PRC with a large role in thwarting world economies from being swept over the brink in 2008-2009.

How was this done?

In my view, those structures intact from the PRC’s early commitment to socialist economics proved to be a bulwark against global economic turmoil, especially from the financial sector. Regardless of the future course of the Chinese economy, many elements of socialist economic structures remain and they and they alone, permitted the PRC to evade the harshest consequences of the 2008-2009 collapse and blunt the forces of the market.

1. Banks and finance: The PRC’s four largest banks dominate the financial system along with the Central Bank. Despite recent public offerings, the big four banks remain 75% or more under public ownership. The experiment in raising private funds through stock offerings has proven to be more damaging (a recent sell-off briefly rocked the stability of these public institutions) than advantageous, but, nevertheless, the banks remain steadfast under government management. And the Central Bank, unlike our corporate dominated Federal Reserve, functions as a publicly run and owned institution tuned in closely to government economic goals. The “shadow banking” that rocked Western private banks was virtually unknown in the PRC: no securitized US mortgages, no complex derivatives, opaque bank-to-bank deals, etc. The pillars of the financial system, because they were publicly owned and relatively transparent, stood solid against the crisis; they retained the central functions of a financial system without the corruption of private profiteering.

For sure, private banking in the PRC exists and jolts the smooth functioning and stability of the financial system, but to date the government has been able to adjust financial flows swiftly and efficiently.

2. Economic Policy: The PRC retains indicative planning, though flexible and partial. With the onset of the global crisis, the PRC embarked on a sharp turn towards domestic consumption and investment and away from a deteriorating international market. Quickly adopting a massive $622 billion stimulus program and loosening the valves on lending from the publicly owned banks, the PRC minimized the damage from a collapsing global capitalist economy. While the West, stumbled and delayed, politicizing and horse-trading intervention in the economy, the PRC acted promptly and decisively. As a result, the PRC maintained a growth rate well above Western norms through 2008-2009, while nearly all other countries endured negative growth.

Even with the corrosive and corruptive influences of capitalist social relations, the Communist Party of China remains a leading institution linked to advancing the general welfare of the people. That is, it continues to respect and seek the promotion of national interests. Compare its performance in the face of severe crisis to the appalling submission of bourgeois democratic institutions in the West to the welfare and interests of capitalist institutions; banks and corporations were rescued while living standards were decimated. In terms of serving the interests of the vast majority of the people, the PRC institutions proved far more democratic in content than the formal Western “democracies”.

3. Planned development: The PRC adopted the “National Medium- and
Long-Term Plan for the Development of Science and Technology” in 2006, a plan that proposed doubling the percentage of GDP devoted to research and development through 2020. At the end of this November, the PRC confirmed a plan to spend $1.7 trillion over the next 5 years on sectors including alternative energy, biotechnology, and advanced equipment manufacturing (Reuters, 11-21-11). Such national planning is virtually unheard of in the West since the massive investments in infrastructure, education, and research and development brought forth by the panic over the Soviet launch of Sputnik.

Chinese planning shows much more responsiveness and flexibility than policy initiatives in the West. With global demand shrinking from 2008 through 2009, the PRC shifted swiftly with internal investment and expanded consumption while Western powers debated and hesitated.

4. Public ownership: With state banks opening the floodgates, and a
Communist Party leadership quickly implementing a stimulus program, publicly-owned enterprises reacted immediately and decisively to the call to expand economic activity. While the public sector was curtailed in the early years of the shift to market relations, it remains dramatically larger than in Western countries or most Asian neighbors. In a generally hostile article in The Wall Street Journal (China’s ‘State Capitalism’ Sparks a Global Backlash, 11-16-10), the authors make the point vividly: In 2008, the assets of the PRC’s publicly owned firms totaled 133% of economic output; in the same year, France’s state-owned firms’ assets amounted to only 28% of economic product. While much speculation revolves around the role of the public sector in the PRC, these numbers give a perspective on how important publicly-owned enterprises are in the PRC. Thus, when essential stimulus programs or planning initiatives are undertaken, they translate into rapid, measurable results, unlike in the US where policies are pushed through the sieve of private contractors with the consequent siphoning off of overhead and profits, few jobs created, and long delays.

While many in the West are skeptical of the PRC’s ability to move away from export-driven manufacturing to domestic consumption, the following figures are revealing: Exports as a percentage of GDP have fallen from 35% in 2007 to 27% in 2010; third quarter 2011 import growth exceeded export growth; and retail sales grew by 17% in August and 17.7% in September of this year against the prior year.

Of course the PRC’s success in weathering the economic crisis is no guarantee that it will do so going forward. Certainly the PRC leadership is aware of difficulties ahead. The PRC Vice Premier, Wang Qishan, was recently quoted by the Xinhua news agency: “The one thing that we can be certain of, among all the uncertainties, is that the global economic recession caused by the international financial crisis will be chronic.”

The country’s participation in global markets could present problems that even its remaining socialist tools cannot overcome. Moreover, it is not clear if the PRC will strengthen these safeguards or jettison them, as its leading Communist Party shapes this awkward mix of socialism and capitalism.

Thus, forty-five years after Dutt’s pamphlet, we are still left with the burning question: Whither China?

Zoltan Zigedy
zoltanzigedy@gmail.com

—
Posted By zoltan zigedy to ZZ’s blog at 12/14/2011 01:10:00 PM

Final Statement
The 13th International Meeting of Communist and Workers’ Parties was held in Athens on 9-11 December 2011 with theme:
“SOCIALISM IS THE FUTURE!
The international situation and the experience of the communists 20 years after the counterrevolution in the USSR. The tasks for the development of the class struggle in conditions of capitalist crisis, imperialist wars, of the current popular struggles and uprisings, for working class-popular rights, the strengthening of proletarian internationalism and the anti-imperialist front, for the overthrow of capitalism and the construction of socialism”.
The meeting was attended by representatives from 78 Parties from 59 countries. A number of parties that did not manage to take part for reasons beyond their control sent written messages. We salute from Athens the growing popular struggles releasing huge emancipatory potential against imperialism, against capitalist exploitation and oppression, and for the social, labour and social security rights of workers’ all over the world.
The meeting was held in critical conditions in which the deep and prolonged capitalist crisis continues to prevail in the international situation, accompanied by the escalation of the aggressiveness of imperialism which is expressed in the decisions of the Lisbon Summit for the new NATO strategy. This reality confirms the analyses outlined in the statements of the 10th, 11th, 12th, International Meetings that took place in Brazil (Sao Paolo) in 2008, India (New Delhi) in 2009 and South Africa (Tshwane) in 2010.
It becomes increasingly obvious for millions of working people that the crisis is a crisis of the system. It is not faults within the system but the system itself that is faulty, generating regular and periodic crises. It results from the sharpening of the main contradiction of capitalism between the social character of production and the private capitalist appropriation and not from any version of the management policy of the system or from any aberration based on the greed of some bankers or other capitalists or from the lack of effective regulatory mechanisms. It highlights the historical boundaries of capitalism and the need to strengthen the struggles for anti-monopoly anti-capitalist ruptures, the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism.
In the USA, Japan, the EU, and in other capitalist economies the impasses of the various versions of the bourgeois management are being demonstrated. On the one hand the restrictive political line leads to a prolonged and deep recession; on the other, the expansionist political management, with large state support packages to the monopoly groups, finance capital, and the banks, intensifies inflation and leads to the swelling of the public debt. Capitalism converts corporate insolvencies into sovereign insolvencies. Capitalism has no other response to the crisis beyond the mass destruction of productive forces, resources, mass dismissals, factory closures, and the comprehensive attack on workers and trade union rights, on wages, pensions, social security, the reduction in people’s income, the huge increase in unemployment and poverty.
The anti-people offensive is strengthening which is manifested with particular intensity in certain regions. The concentration and centralization of monopoly capital is intensifying the reactionary character of economic and political power. Capitalist restructuring and privatisations are being promoted, aiming at competitiveness and maximisation of profit of capital, at ensuring a cheaper labour force and the regression of decades in terms of social and labour rights.
The intensity of the crisis, its global synchronisation, the prospect of the slow, weak recovery intensify the difficulties of the bourgeois forces in managing the crisis, leading to the sharpening of the inter-imperialist contradictions and rivalries while the danger of imperialist wars is being strengthened.
The attacks on democratic rights and sovereignty are intensifying in many countries. Political systems become more reactionary. Anti-communism is being reinforced. There are generalised measures against the activity of the communist and workers’ parties, against the trade union, political and democratic freedoms The ruling classes develop a multi faceted attempt to trap the people’s discontent through changes in the political systems, through the utilisation of a series of pro-imperialist NGOs and other organizations, through attempts to channel the people’s discontent into movements with allegedly non-political or even with reactionary characteristics.
We salute the people’s and workers extensive struggles and uprisings, for democratic, social and political rights against the anti-people regimes in the Middle East and North Africa, namely in Tunisia and Egypt. Despite the contradictions which the current situation manifests, it constitutes a significant experience that the communist movement should study and utilise. Simultaneously we strongly condemn the imperialist war of NATO and the EU against the Libyan people and the threats and interference in the internal affairs of Syria and Iran, as well as of any other country. We consider that every foreign intervention against Iran under whatever pretext attacks the interests of the Iranian workers and their struggles for democratic freedoms, social justice and social rights.
These developments confirm the necessity of strengthening the Communist and Workers’ Parties in order to play their historical role, to further strengthen the workers and people’s struggle in defence of their rights and aspirations, to utilise the contradictions of the system and the inter-imperialist contradictions for an overthrow at the level of power and economy, for the satisfaction of people’s needs. Without the leading role of the communist and workers parties and the vanguard class, the working class, the peoples will be vulnerable to confusion, assimilation and manipulation by the political forces that represent the monopolies, finance capital and imperialism.
Significant realignments in the international correlation of forces are under way. There is the on-going relative weakening of the position of the USA, the general productive stagnation in the most advanced capitalist economies and the emergence of new global economic powers, notably China. The tendency for the increase of contradictions is strengthening, between the imperialist centres, and of these with the so-called emerging economies.
Imperialist aggressiveness intensifies. There are already several regional points of tension and wars and they are multiplying: in Asia and Africa, in the Middle East with the increasing aggressiveness of Israel particularly against the Palestinian people. At the same time we note the rising of neo Nazi and xenophobic forces in Europe, the multifaceted interventions, threats and the offensive against the people’s movements and the progressive political forces in Latin America. Militarization is being reinforced. The risk for a general conflagration at a regional level becomes even greater. In this sense the expansion and strengthening of the anti-imperialist social and political front and the struggles for peace in the direction of eradicating the causes of imperialist wars are fundamental.
There are two paths of development:
– the capitalist path, the path of the exploitation of the peoples which creates great dangers for imperialist wars, for workers’, people’s democratic rights
– and the path of liberation with immense possibilities for the promotion of the interests of the workers and the peoples, for the achievement of social justice, people’s sovereignty, peace and progress. The path of the workers’ and people’s struggles, the path of socialism and communism, which is historically necessary.
Thanks to the decisive contribution of the communists and the class oriented trade-union movement the workers’ struggles in Europe and all over the world were further strengthened. Imperialist aggressiveness continues to meet resolute popular resistance in the Middle East, Asia, Africa and Latin America. This fact, along with experience accumulated so far especially in Latin America, the struggles and the processes that take place demonstrate the possibilities of resistance, of class struggle, in order for the peoples to make steps forward, to gain ground inflicting blows to imperialism when they have as their goal the overthrow of imperialist barbarity.
We salute the workers’ and people’s struggles and note the need to further strengthen them. The conditions demand the intensification of the class struggle, of the ideological, political, mass struggle in order to impede the anti-people measures and promote goals of struggle that meet the contemporary people’s needs; demand an organized workers’ counterattack for anti-monopoly and anti-imperialist ruptures, for the overthrow of capitalism putting an end to the exploitation of man by man.
Today the conditions are ripe for the construction of wide social anti-monopoly and anti-imperialist alliances, capable of defeating the multifaceted imperialist offensive and aggression and of fighting for power and promoting deep, radical, revolutionary changes. Working class unity, the organisation and the class orientation of the labour movement are fundamental factors in ensuring the construction of effective social alliances with the peasantry, the urban middle class strata, the women’s movement and youth movement.
In this struggle the role of the communist and workers’ parties at national, regional and international level and the strengthening of their cooperation are indispensable. The joint coordinated activity of the Communist and Workers’ Parties, of the communist youth organizations and the anti-imperialist organizations in which the communists have an important contribution constitutes one of the most reliable elements for the expansion of the anti-imperialist struggle and the strengthening of the anti-imperialist front.
The ideological struggle of the communist movement is of vital importance in order to defend and develop scientific socialism, to repulse contemporary anti-communism, to confront bourgeois ideology, anti-scientific theories and opportunist currents which reject the class struggle; combat the role of social democratic forces that defend and implement anti-people and pro-imperialist policies by supporting the strategy of capital and imperialism. The understanding of the unified character of the duties of the struggle for social, national and class emancipation, for the distinct promotion of the socialist alternative requires the ideological counteroffensive of the communist movement.
The overthrow of capitalism and the construction of socialism constitute an imperative need for the peoples. In view of the capitalist crisis and its consequences the international experiences and practice of the socialist construction prove the superiority of socialism. We underline our solidarity with the peoples who struggle for socialism and are involved in the construction of socialism.
Only socialism can create the conditions for the eradication of wars, unemployment, hunger, misery, illiteracy, the uncertainty of hundreds of millions of people, the destruction of the environment. Only socialism creates the conditions for development according to the contemporary needs of the workers.
Working people, farmers, urban and rural workers, women, young people, we call on you to struggle together to put an end to this capitalist barbarity. There is hope, there is a prospect. The future belongs to socialism.
SOCIALISM IS THE FUTURE!
Athens, December 11, 2011
http://www.solidnet.org/13-international-meeting