international newsletter no. 33, july 2007 - international conference of marxist- leninist parties...

International Newsletter DEFEND MARXISM-LENINISM AND MAO ZEDONG THOUGHT ____________________________________________________________________________________________

July 2007 Publisher: Joint Coordinating Group (JCG) No. 33 ___________________________________________________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Mailing Address: T. Scheller, P.O. Box 131058, D-70068 Stuttgart, Germany Fax: 49-711-9979571, Email: [email protected], www.icmlpo.de

Price per copy: US$ 5.00 – Euro 5.00 € Financial contributions should be sent to:

Landesbank Baden Württemberg, Germany, IBAN DE 45 600 501 01 000 76 38 578, T. Scheller _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

History of the Party Ranjbaran Ranjbaran, Iran.....................................................27 Country Report Italy Party of the Committees to Support Resistance – for Communism (CARC) - Italy ……….................30 United Front, Class and the Party Contribution to 9th IC PC (ML) Panama ................................................. 32 Country Report Peru PC del Peru (ML)...................................................36 Country Report Turkey Bolshevik Party (North Kurdistan-Turkey............40 The Economic and Political Development of the Imperialist World System Bolshevik Party (North Kurdistan-Turkey)...........47 The Struggle of the International Working Class, the Anti-imperialist Struggles of the Peoples and Marxist-Leninist Party Building Bolshevik Party (North Kurdistan-Turkey)...........51 Forms of Organization of International Cooperation - History, Present and Future Bolshevik Party (North Kurdistan-Turkey)...........56 Country Report Ray O. Light, USA ............................................. 58

Content Principles of the International Conference...........................2 Country Report Argentina PCRA Argentina ........................................3 Mao’s Legacy in China’s Current Development, 3rd and last part Pao Yu Ching, ...........................................5 Country Report Germany Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany MLPD…................................................... 9 The History of the ”Internationale” as Form of Organization of the International Revolution Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany MLPD.......................................................14 Country Report IndiaCPI (ML), India ......................................22 The Struggle of the International Working Class, the Anti-imperialist Struggles of the Peoples and Marxist-Leninist Party Building CPI(ML) India ..............................…….24 The Development of the International Conference of Marxist-Leninist Parties and Organisations (ICMLPO) and Preparation of the 10th International Conference CPI(ML) India..........................................26

International Newsletter No. 33 July 2007

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The International Conference is a forum of Marxist-Leninist parties and organizations. Participation in the International Conference is based on the following main criteria: • Adherence to Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought and their creative application in

the conduct of the class struggle in each country. • Struggle against modern revisionism, and a positive attitude towards Stalin and Mao. • Acceptance of the Rules of the Conference. The 4th Conference adopted the following principles on which the cooperation of theparticipating Marxist-Leninist organizations is based, which were amended and again adopted atthe 8th Conference:

• Independence and equality, mutual respect, mutual support and cooperation. • Non-interference in internal affairs as well as in the bilateral or regional relations or any

party or organization with other parties and organizations. Every organization is sovereignin its conclusions.

• Consensus and unanimity in decision-making. • Achieve gradual unity step by step; principled debate and cooperation among

parties/organizations and no public attack by any party/organization on another. • Obligation of all participating organizations to prepare and conduct the 9th International

Conference jointly in accordance with their possibilities. • Financial independence and self-financing of the common work according to the

possibilities.

Call for the Support of the International Conference of Marxist- Leninist Parties and Organizations (ICMLPO)

The internationalization of production and the globalization of the fundamental problems of mankind in the entireworld lead to the internationalization of the class struggle and therefore also demand increased and systematiccooperation among Marxist-Leninists. For this reason we call upon all progressive, democratic and anti-imperialist people in the entireworld to support the cooperation among the Marxist-Leninists for the emancipation of theinternational working class and the national and social liberation of the people and to make theconvening of the International Conference possible. Donate to fund the 9th InternationalConference of Marxist-Leninist Parties and Organizations (ICMLPO):

International Donation Account:

T. Scheller, Account No. DE 45 6005 0101 000 76 38 578 Bank code: 6000 501 01, Landesbank Baden-Württemberg

Treasurer of the International Conference of the Marxist-Leninist Parties and Organizations

April 2007


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Country Report Argentina PCR Argentina

1. As the Program of our Party states: ”Argentina is a dependent country, is part of the group of colonial, semi-colonial and dependent countries oppressed by imperialist countries. Capitalist relations of production are predominant along with a very important industrial development that placed Argentina at the top of the Latin American ranking during the 50´s. This relations of production are historically jammed and distorted by imperialist dominion and maintenance of large state property in the country side (latifundium). This economic structure and the policies applied by the ruling classes make the important wealth and means of our country to contrast with hunger, unemployment and poverty of our people. Argentina makes part of Latin America, traditional area of Yankee imperialism. It has been and still is a country for which several imperialist powers contend for”. 2. Main contradiction to be solved at the present historical phase and that determines the nature of argentine revolution is the one that opposes in one side the imperialism, landlords, compradora bourgeoisie and reactionary forces subordinated to them, and in the other side the working class and other wage earners, semi-proletarians, poor and median peasants, original peoples, petit bourgeoisie, majority of students and intellectuals, patriotic and democratic portions of the urban and rural bourgeoisie, soldiers and patriotic and democratic officers and noncommissioned officers of the military. 3. This main contradiction can be solved only through a democratic, popular, agrarian and anti-imperialist revolution in progress toward socialism. 4. During the year 2001, huge masses burst into a popular revolt: The Argentinazo. An objective revolutionary situation was created. The Argentinazo was unable to impose a government of patriotic and popular unity because it did not have the required organization and leadership. We do not have the same situation now but mass peak still remains. 5. Kirchner´s government takes advantages of an international economic favorable condition in order to put an end to the hegemony crisis within the ruling classes bloc that emerged in the Argentinazo based on the increase of international prices of agrarian products, first of all Soya bean, oil, fishing and mining. Despite the contradictions within the ruling classes bloc they are all interested in reverting this crisis of hegemony.

6. Although, the government has received several blows in the last period a.) people of Misiones province massively repudiated government’s candidate due to his corruption and attempt to perpetuate in power. b.) Kirchner´s attitude of not supporting the commemorative acts for the 25th Anniversary of Malvina´s War, a fair war which showed that Argentina is a country dependent from imperialism, with a portion of its territory occupied by Great Britain that defends its occupation of the islands and of the maritime argentine Antarctic sector with atomic submarines. c) During the last period of time a big struggle was waged by teachers in several provinces. The murder of a teacher in Neuquén generated huge demonstrations throughout the country. Particularly important were the struggles waged by teachers in Santa Cruz, Kirchener´s province, that were on strike during more than 30 days and with the support of the entire population. 7. Kirchner tries to present himself to the public as opposed to the policies applied during the 90¨s, Decade of budget shortcuts policies and surrendering of our national wealth that some call ”neo-liberalism”. Although Kirchner actively participated in the most important part of that decade: with the privatization of the oil, gas, transport, everything. Even more, they urged former national government to privatize YPF (former state oil enterprise). This still remains so and he just extended to PANAMERICAN (union of the English British Petroleum with Bridas, of Russian capitals but it appears as argentine)since 2017 to 2047, the concession of one of the main oilfield in Chubut. 8. Another foundation of the 90´s was large state property in the countryside (latifundium). Menem knocked off the reforms achieved by rural workers during Isabel Peron´s government and stablished freedom of contracts, he also knocked off agrarian laws, and today there are oral renting contracts of land for a year or a crop, in some cases reaching 50%. 9. Big large state properties(latifundium)in the countryside not only persist but are also enlarged. Benetton has 900 thousands hectares in Argentina, 200 thousands of them in Santa Cruz. Besides, foreign ownership of the land is deepening in


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Argentina. The northamerican Tompkins, who owns more than 300 thousands hectares at Kirchner´s province, Santa Cruz, and the Esteros of Ibera in Corrientes. A Chilean monopoly, Arauco, and some other that have more than 100 thousands hectares in Corrientes and Misiones. 10. National government follows a policy of high dollar in order the exporters can earn money and at the same time they can have treasury surplus. This surplus is not used for education or health, or any other popular needs. It is used for the payment of the foreign debt. At the same time, this policy rises inflation that people suffers with the reduction in their life conditions. 11. The use of the Gendarmery in Santa Cruz to repress teacher ´s strike and recent enforcement of Antiterrorist Law, required by Bush’s government, shows which is the real Kirchner´s government human rights policy. 12. On the other side, Jorge Julio López´s abduction and threat against other witnesses of trials against genocides of the dictatorship also show that Kirchner´s policy is not a guarantee for defending human rights against fascists. 13. There is a strong pressure from those who support Kirchner in order to justify themselves and they state that: ”Kirchner is in the same line of Cuba, Venezuela, Correa and Evo Morales”, and they accuse us to attack him not taking in consideration that fascism and those who wants the so-called ”national reconciliation” for the dictatorship murderers” will arise. They also say that to attack Kirchner is to favor Yankee imperialism that wants to split Argentina from Chavez and to move it closer to Lula´s Brazil”. We do not want that. So each time national government has hit the Yankees, as it was in Mar del Plata president´s meeting for the ALCA, there the RCP was present. Our party and our glorious youth were present, demonstrating on the streets. And when Bush came to Montevideo, and there was the need to demonstrate along with Chavez, there was the RCP, as all the world watched on TV. We are not stingy about this. Of course we always preserve our independence. We understand that for Cuban, Venezuelan and Evo Morales´governments it is a reason of State not to offend Kirchner. Despite they snubbed Fidel Castro when he visited Argentina few days before he got ill. We understand Cuban´s reason of State when they do not address Kirchner as a pro-Yankee ruler. And we understand Chavez, despite Kirchner and wife’s comings and goings with their statements to the World Jew Committee about the report that accuses Iran of AMIA´s terrorist attack. We understand when Chavez says that is a ”reason

of State” for Venezuelan government to have a policy of certain consideration towards Kirchner. But it has been almost 40 years when we splitted from the old ”Communist” Party and we created the Revolutionary Communist Party of Argentina because the CP had made a ”reason of State” of the defense of Soviet government´s – which already was imperialist but it ”look like socialist” for the world- diplomatic positions.. We took an oath by then- that we have honored- that the only and sole ”reason of State” for us is to defense the interests of the working class and oppressed peoples of the city and the country. 14. Huge struggles gave birth to a new phenomenon multi-sectorials and self-convokeds. These are Latin-American experiences: they were the base of the Caracazo, of the Bolivian people uprising with the water multi-sectorial in Cochabamba and in El Alto, and they were the foundation of great progress in the era of big struggles against Menem. During the last popular rebellions appears again the moto ”¡They should all go away!”: it arose in Misiones, Alberdi in Tucumán, Santa Cruz and Santa Fé. 15. A political crisis is fully developing in Argentina. Even without talking of economic crisis. Of course we are aware that there are fascistas and right wing forces that take advantage of the situation and are plotting! But we are going to stop the right wing forces if a powerful popular movement grows and is able to impose a government of popular and revolutionary unity. 16. With the elections they are going to choose a manager for those who manage Argentina. If in these elections a popular and anti-imperialist front in order to impose a government of popular unity and open the way were possible as it was in Venezuela, Bolivia, or Ecuador, we would be there. We would support and be there. Being aware, of course, that it is only a way of approach, because in Latinamerica the power had never been conquered from the government, because without a revolution nothing can be solved. 17. Some tell us: ”You do not want that an alternative may exist, a space”. No. We do not want to create and ”alternative” or a ”space” within the system. We want to overthrow the system!. We shall keep fighting through the way pointed by the Argentinazo, in order to impose a revolutionary government of broad popular and anti-imperialist unity that shall open the path for the revolution in Argentina. #


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Mao’s Legacy in China’s Current Development

3rd and last part Pao Yu Ching

III. The Relevance of China from the Left Perspective. The representatives of international monopoly capital obviously think China is relevant. They set China up as, in the words of Hart-Landsberg and Burkett, their ”poster country” for good reasons. In an era of global crisis and economic stagnation, China has become one country where the economic growth rates have stayed high. Multinational corporations have profited from China by investing their surplus capital and exploiting its cheap labor. Deng’s Reform to open up China to foreign goods and investments, and China further liberalizing its economy since its accession into the WTO, came at an opportune time for global monopoly capital. They seized the time to expand to this large piece of virgin land and into what they see as a gargantuan market for their surplus products. Moreover, the development in China in the past two and half decades has been relevant ideologically to the representatives of the global capital and the ruling class in imperialist countries. The scholars on the Right regard China as one more piece of evidence in their argument that capitalism has won and that history has indeed come to an end. They argue that China abandoned socialism and embraced capitalism to save itself from its turbulent past that left its economy in ruins. Since the Right conveniently possesses the power to interpret freedom and democracy, they have further asserted that capitalism will eventually bring freedom and democracy to the Chinese people. The question then is: Why should China be relevant to the Left? After China was on its way to restore capitalism and the former Soviet Union and Eastern European countries collapsed, many

on the Left lost their confidence that socialism would one day replace capitalism. The Right, on the other hand, had a well-planned strategy to aggressively attack and discredit socialism and proclaimed the triumph of capitalism at a moment when capitalism itself was in deep crisis. In the West, most on the Left had a difficult time defending those former socialist countries; they also had trouble explaining why attempts to institute socialism ended so disastrously. Some on the Left, however, did offer some explanations. In May 1998 the Monthly Review published a special issue commemorating the 150 year anniversary of the Communist Manifesto, which included an article written by Ellen Meiksins Wood --”The Communist Manifesto After 150 Years.”i In her article Wood returned to Marx’s manifesto to explain the historic ”failures” of socialism. She said, ”...[W]e should not underestimate the significance of his [Marx’s] assumption that a socialist revolution would be most likely to succeed in the context of a more advanced capitalism. In that sense, it could be argued that the ultimate failure of the Russian revolution, which occurred in the absence of those preconditions, fulfilled his predictions all too well”ii. (Note: Three of us disagreed with her analysis and conclusions and we responded by writing a letter to the Monthly Review editors. I am integrating portions of that letter below.) Wood’s article represented a good number of people on the Left, who were at a loss to defend the former socialist countries. Since they felt defenseless from the vicious attacks of the Right, they tried to disassociate and unburden themselves from the histories and realities of those countries. In making that choice, they also disassociated themselves from the heroic


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struggles of the Russian people in winning the revolution, the liberation of Russian people after the revolution, and the achievements made in the early decades of the Soviet Union. They relieved themselves of the burden of explaining or understanding how and why so called communist leaders betrayed the revolution, why a country that began with such great hopes, degenerated into the conditions that we all witnessed, until its final collapse. Wood chose to explain the failure of socialism by asserting that the former socialist countries did not meet what she called ”Marx’s prerequisites for a transition from capitalism to socialism...” – an assertion with some rather serious implications. One of these implications is that all former attempts to develop socialism were doomed to fail from the beginning, because those countries did not meet the prerequisites set forth by Marx. It’s unfortunate then, that people in the past did not understand Marx’s prerequisites, and as a consequence sacrificed their lives for an unattainable goal. It also implies that oppressed people living in less developed countries today, would do well to learn from the mistakes made by revolutionaries in the past and not to engage in any revolutionary struggles lest they repeat them. If we were to believe her analysis and conclusions, then this argument would have the same impact as arguments made by the Right, who debunk Marxism and socialism as utopian dreams. We responded in our letter: What Marx did not foresee was the emergence of imperialism. Its dominance changed the landscape… For the most part, imperialism does not develop the productive forces in its ”client” countries. In countries such as the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, and Mexico (to name a few), there is no illusion that the exploitation of their labor forces and natural resources will lead to any kind of advanced capitalist development. They are merely pools of disposable workers for low skill, low pay jobs in factories and in fertile fields that agribusiness seized and converted from sustainable agriculture to huge cash crops. The factories manufacture goods and the

plantations grow food for export that the native people cannot use or afford. They are environmental dumping grounds that are destroying the land, water, and air. Marx’s prediction about capitalism developing productive forces can only be taken in context of the time in which he wrote, and reexamined in the context of the world today. But, as it is laid out in the context of his other work, culminating in his masterpiece Das Capital, his overall analysis of capitalism is still dead on. iii Why then, did the Soviet Union collapse? Why is China restoring capitalism? These are heavy questions, ones that require further study of concrete history. The lack of advanced capitalist development in those countries may well have been a factor. It is not, however, the only nor most important one. It is of the utmost important for the Left to study and to analyze the reasons behind the failures to attempt to build socialism. The Left in China are already engaged in analyzing why a system that benefited so many people could be so ”peacefully” transformed. If the Left in the West indeed believes that the development of productive forces is the precondition for socialism, what should the Left tell people in the less developed world, who have suffered even more severely in the past two and half decades, when imperialist countries with the help of international financial and trade organizations, shifted the burden of global crisis to them through so called globalization? Should the Left in the West tell them not to move forward, even when the conditions for revolution already exist? Should they hold off any actions because according to Marx they have not yet met the preconditions for socialist transition, and so they should wait for their brothers and sisters in the advanced countries to take the lead? Later we were encouraged to read Harry Magdoff write -- ”A Note on the Communist Manifesto ” in the same issue: ...in view of the way capitalism has spread throughout the world... it is essential that the vision of socialism focus on a social transformation which will put first and foremost: the empowerment and meeting the


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basic human needs of the poorest, the most oppressed, and disadvantaged.iv The Chinese people, before the 1949 revolution were among the poorest, the most oppressed, and disadvantaged. Chinese peasants suffered thousands of years under the cruel land tenure system of feudalism, that entitled landlords to take all (if not more) of the agricultural surpluses through exorbitant rent on their land and usury interests on their loans. In more recent history, the Chinese people suffered more than one hundred years of war imposed upon them by imperialist aggressors. The 1911 revolution, led by the bourgeoisie, did not terminate the land tenure system, nor did it lead to any economic development. China remained weak and defenseless against foreign aggression. The founding of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921 brought hope to the China. The Chinese people, under the leadership of CCP in a coalition with the Kuomingtang (KMT), fought eight long years against Japanese invasion and occupation and finally won the war against Japan in 1945. In June 1945, on the eve of the victory against Japan, Mao wrote ”The Foolish Old Man who Moved the Mountains.” He used an old Chinese folklore as a metaphor, showing the Chinese people that the two big mountains blocking their way and pressing down upon them were imperialism and feudalism. He urged the Chinese people to learn from the foolish old man who proved that he could move the two mountains, one shovelful at a time, to work as diligently to dig their way out from under the oppression of these two big mountains.v In the next four years, the Chinese people, under the leadership of the CCP, won the revolution. And during the 30 years of socialist construction that followed, China was able to achieve rapid development in agriculture, industry, transport, and construction. The annual growth rate for agriculture, industry and transport, and construction grew at the average rates of 3.4%, 9.4% and 10.7%, respectively during the period of 1952 and 1978.vi China was able to develop both its heavy and light industries and lay the foundation for long-term and sustainable growth. It achieved in

those thirty years, a balanced growth between industry and agriculture, so that the peasants’ standard of living in the countryside, though still behind urban residents, improved, narrowing the gap between the two. The peasants worked extremely hard to build the foundation of agriculture, including irrigation and drainage systems, basic infrastructure such as roads and bridges, and land conservation and improvement. The State also gradually reduced agricultural taxes, improving the terms of trade in favor of the agricultural sector, and increased State investment in large agricultural infrastructure, such as the Red Flag Canal and Yellow River Project among many others. One of the most important accomplishments in those 30 years, was that by the end of the 1970’s, even though China was still a poor country, it was able to raise the welfare of its population at large. In that relatively short span of time, indicators such as life expectancy, infant mortality, nutrition levels, and literacy rates in China, were closer to those of developed countries than of the underdeveloped countries.vii China was able to make those accomplishments in the most unfavorable and hostile international environment. China developed its economy by relying on its internal savings, without any outside help.viii During those years, China was under an economic embargo by the United States and other Western countries. Moreover, China had to spend a lot of its scarce resources to build its military defenses, as it faced constant military threats during the twenty years between the Korean War and the Vietnam War. Some may argue that the China has achieved even higher rates of economic growth in the post-Reform years.ix In addition to the question of who has actually benefited from the high rates of growth, China’s current development is unsustainable. The high rates of growth, on the one hand, were generated by large sums of foreign investment, in the magnitude of $50 billion a year, for the past few years. Foreign investment coupled with government investment in infrastructure, buildings and industries has been used to combat recession in the few years after 1998 and has created excess capacity of over 90% of China’s industries.xxi In


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1995 excess capacity for bicycles, color TV’s, washing machines, and air-conditioners, was 45%, 54%, 57% and 70%, respectively. Moreover, China’s overwhelming dependence on exports for growth can no longer continue. European Union and Japanese economies are stagnated and US trade deficits (one third of which is with China), which have been financed entirely by external borrowing, has reached an alarming level; China’s exports will soon run out of places to go. China’s financial institutions, heavily burdened by bad debts, are very fragile and will have to face increasing competition from foreign banks in China. The real estate bubble in China’s big cities looks increasingly like those experienced by the Southeast Asia countries in the late 1990s. Even some mainstream economists agree that the crisis is China is inevitable. Hart-Landsberg and Burkett accurately stated that China’s development since the Reform cannot serve as a model for other less developed countries. The crisis when it does occur in China will further destroy the myth that in the long run a country can depend on export to develop its economy. However, China’s revolutionary victory against imperialism and the socialist development in the thirty years that followed, served and still serves as a model of development for other Third World countries. The Chinese people under Mao’s leadership did remove the two big mountains pressing down on them, and in the process they empowered themselves. Workers who have been laid-off or forced into retirement in China today still say with full knowledge and confidence, ”We built this country. We have a glorious past. No one can deny that.” For these reasons China’s socialist development is relevant to the poorest, the most oppressed, and disadvantaged people of the world and, therefore, should be relevant to the Left. In conclusion, Deng’s Reform programs implemented since 1979 have their origins in the previous socialist period. The legacies from the socialist period have not only shaped China’s current development – they will continue to play a dominant role in China’s future, as well as the futures of many other

countries, where the poorest, most oppressed and disadvantaged people are engaging in their struggles against imperialism and capitalism. It has been in Marx’s name and with Marx’s teaching, the workers and peasants in China and elsewhere brought about and will continue to bring great changes and progress. It is their achievements that have made the Communist Manifesto worth celebrating after 157 years. As Mao said ”The road has many twists and turns but the future is bright.” Published in: Asia Weekly (Vol. 18, no. 20, May 16th 2004) i Ellen Meiksins Wood, ”The Communist Manifesto After 150 Years”, Monthly Review, May 1998, pp. 14-35. ii Ibid., 29 iii Dao-yuan Chou, Fred Engst, and Pao-yu Ching, Response to Ellen Meiksins Wood’s article ”The Communist Manifesto After 150 Years,” Monthly Review, May 1998, pp. 14-35. iv Harry Magdoff, ”A Note on the Communist Manifesto, ” Monthly Review, May 1998, p.13 v Mao Zedong, ”The Foolish Old Man who Moved the Mountains,” in Selected Works of Mao Zedong, Peoples’ Publishing Co., 1964, pp. 1101-1104. Another version of ”the Foolish Old Man who removed he mountains has three mountains and the third one was bureaucratic capitalism. vi Thomas Rawski, Economic Growth and Employment in China, Oxford University Press, 1979. vii Sidel, Ruth and Victor W. Sidel, The Health of

China, Beacon Press, 1982. viii Soviet Union pulled back its original aid projects after the ideological disputes between China and the Soviet Union began. China had since paid back all loans extended by the Soviet Union. ix According to some estimates, the official rates of growth posted by Chinese officials are overstated. The World Bank estimated that the real rate of growth between 1978 and 1995 was 1.2% below the official figure. Research published by OECD estimated China’s growth rate in 1986-1994 was only 6%. See Nicholas R. Lardy, Integrating China into the Global Economy, (Brookings Institution Press, 2002) pp. 11-15 for further discussion. x New York Times Magazine, July 4, 2004, p. 30. xi China’s Industrial Development Report, 2003, p. 27. #


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Country Report Germany Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany (MLPD)

The MLPD (and its forerunner organizations) have been doing revolutionary work for just on 40 years. In 2007 the MLPD celebrates the 25th anniversary of its party founding and justifiably can speak of having the biggest mass influence to date in its history and a grown ability to move and lead masses. It meanwhile has a presence in more than 500 cities in all the states of Germany and in half of the 500 largest industrial enterprises. The Marxist-Leninist factory and trade union work of the MLPD among the six million blue- and white-collar workers of large-scale industrial enterprises is our main fighting line. We concentrate 50 percent of our forces on it. We have the strategic goal in the first stage of class struggle, the period of relative calm or of a non-revolutionary situation, to win to the side of socialism the class-conscious workers of the 500 largest industrial enterprises, where as many as three million industrial workers are employed today. We combine our strategy of winning over the decisive majority of the working class for genuine socialism with the inclusion of broad masses in the struggle against the monopolies and the government. Linked with this was the preparation and staging of the independent mass demonstration against the government on November 1, 2003, in Berlin. This demonstration was explicitly rejected by the Rightist trade union leadership and it was mainly thanks to the MLPD that many delegations from big factories set the tone and carried in a clear thrust against the anti-people policies of the then Social-Democrat-led Schröder/Fischer government. One hundred thousand people took part in this biggest self-organized mass demonstration in Berlin against the Schröder/Fischer government. In 2004, in the pay round in the metalworking industry, the monopolies tried to test their power against the working class in order to extend the working hours to 40 per week while at the same time cutting wages. 500,000 metalworkers spontaneously took part in warning strikes and demonstrations and demanded a strike vote. To avoid a strike the monopolies backed down. The dispute over working hours shifted to the individual enterprises. This provided the opportunity for independently fought class disputes.

At the suggestion of the MLPD the attempt to extend working hours was to be answered by company-wide action across national frontiers if possible. In fact, in February at Bosch, then at Siemens, and in July at DaimlerChrysler, powerful company-wide strike days took place. The strike at DaimlerChrysler had special significance. On July 5, 2004, 60,000 DaimlerChrysler workers went out on strike in a company-wide day of strike; 2,000 workers blocked a main traffic artery. Today company-wide struggles practically are an accepted fact for the European working-class and trade union movement! This characterizes the growing influence of the MLPD on the core of the class-militant industrial workers, but also the development of an internationalist consciousness. The working-class offensive in Germany reached its highest point, for the time being, in the seven-day independent strike of 7,600 Opel workers in October 2004 in Bochum against the closure plans of General Motors. Contrary to the attempts of the Rightist works council and metal workers’ union (IG Metall) leadership to call off the strike after just a few hours, the workers organized a general blockade at the gates and the occupation of the factory. Production at all General Motors operations throughout Europe was severely disrupted! There was a well-thought-out information and discussion system, regular discussion and information meetings, and a permanent discussion as to what the next steps should be. In democratic votes and discussions, class consciousness was systematically developed. The international press partly reported live on the strike. The world’s biggest auto company, General Motors, could not enforce its closure plans for the Opel factory! This self-organized strike with its new forms of struggle, its high level of organization, and the European General Motors Day of Action at 13 locations in Belgium, Brazil, Germany, England, Poland, Austria, Portugal, Spain and other countries, with 100,000 participants, was an expression of a new development in the class consciousness of the working class in Germany! Above all it reflected

International Newsletter No. 33 23rd of July 2007

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the grown mass influence of the MLPD. It initiated the transition to the working-class offensive on a broad scale. What does the slogan of the working-class offensive mean? The struggle for everyday demands and partial slogans must be conducted in an offensive manner. Only then is it possible to raise its level. Economic struggle must be combined with political struggle or transformed into political struggle. Individual struggles must be concentrated and developed higher into mass struggles. If necessary, the unionist framework must be broken through and the working class must go over to independent struggles. The working class must successfully come to grips with the social system of the petty-bourgeois mode of thinking so that its class consciousness can unfold and the struggles can develop into class struggle in the true sense. This development towards the working-class offensive is the main thing to enable class struggle to pass over from the first stage of relative calm to the second stage of the acutely revolutionary situation. Whereas the first stage is characterized by relative calm in the class struggle, the second stage is determined by mass economic and political struggles. In conjunction with increasing class disputes, revolutionization of the struggles takes place. Class struggle in the true sense unfolds and moves towards a fundamental decision. A transition to the second stage only can occur if the decisive majority of the working class has been won to the side of socialism on the basis of a close, trusting relationship between the industrial workers and the Marxist-Leninist party, and if the MLPD has become party of the masses. Moreover, it is necessary to draw the broad masses into the struggle against the government. The struggles in the summer and autumn of 2004 were an important step in this direction. In early August 2004 the Monday demonstration movement against the ”Hartz IV” unemployment laws grew into a new mass movement against the government! It reached its climax, for the time being, at the end of August: 250,000 people demonstrated in almost

200 cities. In most cities, from the start the MLPD was able to give this mass movement an independent and unmistakable new character: the open microphone with mass discussion, the participation of various forces on an equal footing on the basis of joint struggle, a democratic culture of debate and struggle, democratic votes on the street, and finally a system of delegates as new form of direct democracy which united the Monday demonstrations into a nationally organized movement. With that the MLPD attained a qualitative leap in mass influence – and also in the media. The union of the Monday demonstration movement with the strength and experience of the MLPD brought a qualitative leap in the development of the militant opposition and also in the efforts to lastingly break through the relative isolation of the MLPD. Today, several thousand Monday demonstrators still rally every Monday in over 120 cities – and have done so more than 130 times. The Monday demonstration movement is an important movement which can unite and focus the social protests against the federal government. The transition to the working-class offensive exerted a major influence and attraction on the Monday demonstration movement as people’s movement against the Schröder-Fischer government. Both were a visible expression of the fact that the Social-Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) has lost in ability to bind the masses to the system. At the moment the Monday demonstrations are mainly public forums for social protest rather than a broad mass movement. The elections to the state parliament in North Rhine-Westphalia on May 22, 2005, ended in a devastating defeat for the SPD on its home ground. On the same evening Schröder declared his resignation as chancellor and announced new elections to the federal parliament. And on the very same evening the MLPD, too, prepared its tactics for the federal elections. Within a very short time the MLPD mounted an impressive, independent, nationwide election campaign. The lasting results are an appreciable strengthening of our membership by 25 percent and the extension of our organized work to a large number of new


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cities, enterprises and regions. 45,000 votes were received, more than four-and-a-half times the result of the last nationwide elections. Under the conditions of the five-percent clause (which refuses any party with less than five percent of the general vote a seat in parliament) and the extensive media boycott of the MLPD our participation was reasonably successful. The elections as a whole confirmed a clear trend to the left in Germany. The Leftist List of PDS (Party of Democratic Socialism) and WASG (Election Alternative Work and Social Justice) made appreciable gains. The SPD lost 4.5 percent. The voters gave the brush-off to the ”dream” government of monopoly capital consisting of CDU (Christian Democrats) and FDP (Free Democrats). The masses did not want any of the established government variants. The process of breaking away from the bourgeois institutions and parties continued. It had gone over into a downright erosion of the mass basis of the dictatorship of the monopolies and the parties and institutions upholding it. The newly formed Grand Coalition of CDU and SPD headed by Angela Merkel put an end to the open political crisis that had broken out in May 2005 by exercising restraint in its attacks on the social rights of the masses. This is an expression of a serious weakening of the monopolies. But pressured by the monopolies, since April 2006 the government began replacing the ”step-by-step policy” with the policy of ”big cruelties”. This immediately gave rise to new mass protests: 1.8 million employees took part in the union-organized struggles of the metalworkers and service workers in the first half of the year – more than triple the number of people participating in strikes in 2005. The strike of the service workers union ver.di against massive changes for the worse in the health system became the longest strike in the public service sector in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany. The big strikes in university hospitals and the persistent protests of health system employees showed that these social strata increasingly have become a part of the industrial proletariat, not only because of their working conditions; their strikes have made them a political part of it, too.

At the same time the intermediate strata in Germany increasingly have begun to move. From 2003 to 2006 around 8.5 million people took to the streets. In part the new people’s movement explicitly cites the working-class movement and takes it as model. That also applies to a definitely invigorated and politicized student movement. With the deployment of UN troops in Lebanon, German imperialism effected a major change in foreign policy and pressed for military involvement of the Federal German Army in the Middle East. A new ”Bundeswehr White Paper” furnishes programmatic justification for the Army’s deployment as a worldwide army of intervention and for the involvement in Bush’s ”New War”, while the majority of the population disapproves of the deployment of the Bundeswehr in foreign countries. The antimilitary and peace struggle must be accorded more weight especially in work among youth. That also applies to the antifascist movement, against the attempt of those in rule, in combination with social demagogy, to build up fascist shock troops as a reserve against the revolutionizing of the masses. In the environmental movement, in conjunction with digesting the sellout of the former ecological party, The Greens, a new upswing is in the making. The working-class offensive includes non-proletarian strata in the struggle against the government. It was among other things the protests targeting the health system which in autumn 2006 led to a rapid loss of confidence not only in the governing parties, but in the entire political system. Opinion polls in September 2006 showed: CDU and SPD each had the backing of only about 30 percent of the voters. A mere 19 percent still had confidence in the government! 66 percent considered the system unjust, and 51 percent were dissatisfied with the entire political system. The slogan, ”The government must go”, met with great approval. The government backed down in a number of areas in order to defuse the situation. The relative economic revival and the reduction in the official unemployment figures conduced to an easing off of the situation in which the separation of the masses from the capitalist system temporarily had peaked. The current relative revival within the framework of the fluctuating


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stagnation has nothing to do with a permanent recovery of the capitalist world economy. It takes place in interaction with a new wave of cross-border mergers and acquisitions which practically amount to a restructuring of entire industries. The accelerated concentration across national borders is a preliminary to the outbreak of a worldwide overproduction crisis. The current economic pickup will not last for long. The present world-spanning mergers, the gigantic speculative bubble on the world stock exchanges already are an expression of a huge plethora of capital which will give vent to itself in a new world economic crisis. As we know, such world economic crises always involve increasingly deeper crises in which the class consciousness of the working class grows by leaps and bounds and the influence of socialism can take hold of the masses. We Marxist-Leninists are well advised to lose no time, get ready in these quieter periods for the sharpening of class struggle and gather forces. The situation of the broad masses in Germany is getting drastically worse. Germany is a leading imperialist country at the stage of state-monopoly capitalism, economically the strongest country in the European Union (EU). With over 82 million inhabitants it also has the biggest population in the EU. 35 million people are gainfully employed; 85 percent of them are in dependent employment. 45 percent of the gainfully employed are women. Whereas the living standard rose steadily until the mid-1970s, since the mid-70s a growing unemployment has emerged as a permanent phenomenon in consequence of the international structural crisis. The situation was seriously aggravated in the new millennium. In real terms, in Germany we meanwhile have 6.8 million unemployed and around 11 million underemployed persons. Accordingly, about 50 percent of the persons in dependent employment are either jobless or underemployed. As a result of the mass unemployment, the general reduction of wages and the smashing of the social reforms, manifestations of a general relative and absolute pauperization appear among the working people which until now we have known mainly from the neocolonially

dependent and oppressed countries. In Germany today 860,000 people are acutely threatened by homelessness, millions live below the poverty line, including 1.7 million children under the age of 14. A major new demand on the class consciousness of the workers is posed by the enlargement of the European Union. The reorganization of international production has added competition between individual countries to the competition in national production. It is very important that the workers recognize across borders that they all belong to one class, and that they not let themselves be played off against each other nationally, as for example the reformist union bureaucracy does trying to split the workers with slogans emphasizing local interests and factory sites. More and more clearly, the dividing line between reformist and revolutionary tactics is the willingness to take up company-wide struggle across borders. On July 12, 2005, 8,000 Electrolux workers walked out simultaneously in Nürnberg (Germany), Italy, Spain, France. On October 21 there was a second European day of action with strikes and demonstrations by 25,000 employees of Electrolux factories in seven European countries. Under the pressure generated by Europe-wide strikes of the dockworkers the EU Parliament was forced to reject Port Package II on January 18, 2006. The dockworkers’ action was a coordinated EU-wide political strike against the EU as instrument of the international monopolies. At the beginning of 2007 a European day of action of the Airbus workforces took place against the restructuring plan Power8. It was preceded by spontaneous strikes in factories in Germany and France and a national day of action in France. A remarkable aspect is the higher level of class consciousness as expressed in the widespread slogan, ”An injury to one is an injury to all.” This consciously declared war on divisive nationalism. Remarkable, too, the high degree of organization in a European day of action of all workforces, in which the processing of the experience of prior European days of action such as at Opel/General Motors is reflected. To prepare and develop an offensive of systematic rank-and-file work, in January 2007 the MLPD


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published a program which uncompromisingly concentrates solely on the interests of the working class and broad masses: The ”15-Point Program for a Political Alternative to the CDU/CSU/SPD Government”. Putting this program through calls for a ”broad, concerted alliance of the militant opposition”. This militant opposition can grow and win only in the unity of the entire working class and the people’s movement and to this end must learn to overcome everything that divides. In the end, the needs of the broad masses cannot be satisfied by reforms, but only by a proletarian revolution should to shoulder with the international Marxist-Leninist and working-class movement and the anti-imperialist struggle of the peoples. Hence we need a broad social discussion on the future of society: on genuine socialism. We can gain new credit for genuine socialism only in offensive confrontation with all forms of anticommunism, reformism and revisionism, with all nice-sounding hopes and expectations in – what some people talk and dream about – a reformed and tamed capitalism, an imperialism without its barbaric ”neoliberal” methods. And it is only possible to gain this credit if the masses acquire a positive basic attitude to Marxism-Leninism, the world outlook of the worldwide working-class movement, and to the superiority of socialism over decaying capitalism. This year we celebrate the 25th anniversary of the founding of our party. Highlights are certainly the international seminar on 2 and 3 August in Essen under the title, ”The Reorganization of International Production and the Preparation of the International Socialist Revolution”, the central celebration on 4 August in Duisburg, and an international antifascist rally on 5 August 2007 at the Buchenwald concentration camp. The MLPD will strengthen its efforts to advance international cooperation. ”Class solidarity, mutual support across frontiers are the order of the day. Proletarian internationalism is the root of our moral and political superiority to wage the struggle to overthrow imperialism and to stand up for a new, socialist society.” (Stefan Engel, Rote Fahne, Nos. 51/52, 2006). The MLPD has set itself the task of organizing the strategic counteroffensive of the working class and promoting the development of class struggle from

the stage of the non-revolutionary situation to the stage of the acutely revolutionary situation. The MLPD can look back on a very favorable balance in this work. Over the past years it has succeeded in moving and leading masses. It was able to play a determinant role at many focal points of the working-class movement, but also the women’s, youth and peace movements as well. The Seventh Party Congress of the MLPD posed the main task of making party building the leading factor in the class struggle. To achieve this, above all any form of worship of spontaneity has to be overcome. The objective is to increase the party’s strength many times over. Only in interrelationship between an appreciably stronger MLPD and überparteilich self-run organizations which really have become mass organizations can the working class and its allies go over to the strategic offensive. Only in the unity of objective factor and subjective factor can the party of the masses emerge and mature. The class contradictions are going to intensify greatly, but no one can predict how the class struggle actually will develop. The MLPD must be prepared for everything and make party building as leading factor the focus of its activities. With the work on the theoretical organ Revolutionärer Weg, Nos. 32-34, The Strategy and Tactics of the International Proletarian Revolution, as main theoretical method of CC leadership work, and with the reorganization of the party as necessary practical preparation for the transition to the second stage, the MLPD has begun to gear its work to the coming developments. The reorganizing of the party into seven state and 50 country organizations is the most important organizational task up until the Eighth Party Congress of the MLPD. The focus is on training in and systematic familiarization with leadership work on the basis of the proletarian mode of thinking. In this endeavor, learning and mastering the dialectical method is the central concern.

June 2007 #


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Contribution to the International Conference The History of the ”International” as Form of Organization

of the International Revolution Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany (MLPD)

The central practical problem of proletarian strategy and tactics is the problem of organization: ”Disunited, the workers are nothing. United, they are everything.” (Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 19, p. 519.) The content and form of proletarian class struggle must constitute a dialectical unity. Since class struggle manifests itself locally, nationally and internationally, it must also have local, national and international forms of organization to unite the individual wageworkers into a superior force. Today, and even more so in future, a system of different international forms of organization is necessary to do justice to the diversity of the class struggle and establish the dialectical unity of theory and practice in the international Marxist-Leninist and working-class movement.

Since its establishment in 1988, the International Conference of Marxist-Leninist Parties and Organizations (ICMLPO) has developed into an important organizational form of the international Marxist-Leninist and working-class movement. It is a discussion forum whose object is gradual ideological-political unification, which has made progress. Accordingly, it cannot be turned into the form of organization required for the international connection of class struggle and revolutionary party building. The upcoming 9th International Conference, however, must make headway in unifying the mode of thinking so that the steps necessary to coordinate and revolutionize the struggles, and the various international forms of organization required for that purpose, can be supported and developed jointly. With this contribution to the agenda item ”Forms of Organization of International Cooperation – History, Present and Future,” the MLPD would like to present various ideas on this issue for joint discussion. The International Working Men’s Association At the beginning of the 1860s the conditions had ripened for the creation of an international political organization of the proletariat. The realization had

prevailed ”that the emancipation of labour is neither a local nor a national, but a social problem, embracing all countries in which modern society exists, and depending for its solution on the concurrence, practical and theoretical, of the most advanced countries” (Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 20, p.14). In 1864 the International Working Men’s Association (IWA) was formed. Marx strongly advocated a democratic form of organization. The IWA did not have a movement to create, but only to unite, to link the already existing, unconnected movements in the different countries. This proletarian tendency prevailed in struggle against a claim to leadership staked by petty-bourgeois democrats and anarchists, who wanted to turn the IWA into a conspiratorial secret society for the engineering of insurrections by a small minority. Under the determining influence of Marx, who was a member of the General Council, the IWA took the overall interests of the workers of all countries as starting point and provided material and moral support in many workers’ struggles. Its influence had, among other things, the effect that the workers no longer let themselves be used as strikebreakers against the workers of other countries. The Paris Commune in March 1871 made it clear that the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie must be replaced by the dictatorship of the proletariat and the bourgeois state destroyed. Marx initially was against the uprising, because he felt it came too soon. But when it broke out he ardently supported the Commune. In his Greeting to the French Workers in 1892 Engels paid tribute to the Commune: ”Its highly internationalist character imparted historical greatness to the Commune. It was a bold challenge to every kind of expression of bourgeois chauvinism” (Marx/Engels, Werke, Vol. 22, p. 284; our translation). The entire European reaction joined forces to suppress the Commune. It could have stood its ground against this united international counterrevolution only if revolutionary uprisings had occurred


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simultaneously in European centers. Marx drew fundamental lessons in 1872: ”Citizens, let us bear in mind this fundamental principle of the International: solidarity! It is by establishing this life-giving principle on a reliable basis among all the workers in all countries that we shall achieve the great aim which we pursue. The revolution must display solidarity, and we find a great example of this in the Paris Commune, which fell because there did not appear in all the centres, in Berlin, Madrid, etc., a great revolutionary movement corresponding to this supreme uprising of the Paris proletariat. (Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 23, p. 256) International solidarity as mutual support through revolutionary uprisings in all capitalist centers is a question of survival both for every proletarian revolution in individual countries and for the international proletarian revolution. Educating the working class in the spirit of proletarian internationalism was the greatest historical service of the IWA. It was not capable of organizing a revolutionary onslaught at the international level. This would have required proletarian-revolutionary parties at least in the most important European countries, but such parties did not yet exist. The defeat of the Paris Commune spelled the end of the International in the form of the IWA. Its General Council moved to New York in 1872 and on Marx’s advice resolved its dissolution on July 15, 1876. Concerning the connection between content and form of the proletarian class struggle, Karl Marx stated in 1875: The international activity of the working classes does not in any way depend on the existence of the ”International Working Men’s Association”. This was only the first attempt to create a central organ for that activity; an attempt which was a lasting success on account of the impulse which it gave, but which was no longer realisable in its first historical form after the fall of the Paris Commune. (”Critique of the Gotha Programme,” Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 24, p. 90) The Second International and Its Collapse The Second International was founded in 1889 by 393 representatives of the working-class movement from 22 European and American countries in Paris. In memory of the heroic struggle of the workers of Chicago on May Day 1886 for the eight-hour

workday they declared the 1st of May the international workers’ day of action. The strengthening of the socialist parties, the growth of the working-class movement and its organizations took place in struggle against advancing revisionism. One of revisionism’s main proponents was E. Bernstein, who preached a gradual, peaceful growing of capitalism into socialism and coined the notorious phrase, ”The movement is everything, the aim is nothing.” In ”The Third International and Its Place in History,” Lenin stated: The First International (1864-1872) laid the foundation of an international organisation of the workers for the preparation of their revolutionary attack on capital. The Second International (1889-1914) was an international organisation of the proletarian movement whose growth proceeded in breadth, at the cost of a temporary drop in the revolutionary level, a temporary strengthening of opportunism, which in the end led to the disgraceful collapse of this International. (Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 29, p. 306) The revolutionary Marxists succeeded in beating off undisguised distortions of the proletarian world outlook and defending Marxist positions. For example, in the face of the imminent threat of war the 1912 congress in Basle called on the peoples to do everything to prevent a predatory war, or in the event of the outbreak of war, to respond with revolutionary actions. But when the imperialist world war broke out in 1914, the abscess of opportunism ruptured. Most leaders of the International, almost all social-democratic parties, made truces with their governments. Under the deceitful slogan ”defense of the fatherland” millions of workers were thrown into the imperialist slaughter to fight each other. In contrast, the Russian Bolsheviks continued to adhere to proletarian internationalism and advocated turning the imperialist war into civil war. Opportunism, which degenerated into social-chauvinism upon the outbreak of world war, was the product of the growth of capitalism of free competition into imperialism. Its essence was the replacement of proletarian revolution by reformism, of class struggle by class collaboration, of proletarian internationalism by bourgeois nationalism. The Second International had changed from within, was dead, ”overcome by opportunism” (Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 21, p. 40). Resolutely breaking with the social-chauvinists, separating from the opportunists, was the first


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condition for a new International. ”There are such that are afraid to admit that the crisis or, to put it more accurately, the collapse of the Second International is the collapse of opportunism” (ibid., p. 35). The Bolsheviks developed keen international activity on behalf of the union of the revolutionary Left. But in most cases, for a long time the revolutionary Left shrank from a complete break with the opportunists and hesitated to found new revolutionary working-class parties. This was one major reason why the forces of reaction were able to bloodily stifle the revolutionary crisis in Europe at the end of the First World War. The 1917 October Revolution could have resulted in the hoped-for chain reaction of international revolution only if, in the most important capitalist countries at least, in particular Germany, revolutionary parties had existed which were willing and able to lead the working class to overthrow ruling monopoly capital. The Bolsheviks, the Russian workers and peasants, did what was possible for the world revolution in their country. But an international organizational form for coordinating the revolutionary movement was lacking. The Founding of the Communist International In March 1919, 52 representatives from 30 countries established the new workers’ International. Except for the Bolsheviks, most were representatives only of small communist groups or currents. Lenin urged the immediate establishment of the International based on the assessment ”that the world revolution is beginning and growing in intensity everywhere” (Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 28, p. 455). As regards the self-image of the Communist International (Comintern), the Manifesto of the First Congress states: If the First International presaged the future course of development and indicated its paths; if the Second International gathered and organized millions of workers; then the Third International is the International of open mass action, the International of revolutionary realization, the International of the deed. (Minutes of the First Congress of the Comintern, Appendix, p. 17; our translation) The Comintern uncompromisingly demanded the break with opportunism and centrism. It was established as a centralized world party to carry out world revolution and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat on an international scale and exerted a great attraction on the class-conscious workers and revolutionaries the world over. It helped directly to form communist parties in various countries. The

strengthening of the communist world movement, with as many as 72 parties and millions of members, was tied to the existence of the Comintern. It was the nightmare of all reactionary governments and regimes. Through the Comintern, proletarian internationalism became a powerful weapon of the working-class movement. It organized international campaigns to protect the Soviet Union against imperialist threats, to defend the Chinese revolution (”Hands off China!”), for solidarity with workers’ struggles, for the release of political prisoners (”Freedom for Thälmann”). A heroic highlight was the International Brigades raised in 1936, in which up to 40,000 antifascists from over 50 countries took up arms to defend the Spanish Republic against the fascist putsch of General Franco and the wirepullers Hitler and Mussolini. The communist parties were national sections of the world party. The directives of the Communist International were binding on them. Between 1919 and 1935 seven World Congresses took place. The elected Executive Committee, based in Moscow, was able to expel persons, groups and entire parties from the Comintern. For admission to the Communist International, at the proposal of Lenin the Second World Congress (1920) adopted ”Theses on the Terms of Admission into the Communist International”, which contained ”21 terms of admission”. Item 17 of Lenin’s proposal stated: ”All decisions of the Communist International’s congresses and of its Executive Committee are binding on all affiliated parties” (Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 31, p. 211). The reason given for this character was that the Comintern at that time was ”operating in conditions of acute civil war” (ibid.). It was a form of organization intended to direct and speed up the world revolutionary process, starting from the October Revolution, and unite the revolutionary masses worldwide. Accordingly, all parties were obligated to ”everywhere build up a parallel illegal organisation, which, at the decisive moment, will be in a position to help the Party fulfil its duty to the revolution” (ibid., p. 208). But the building of parallel structures went far beyond that. Otto Vargas, Secretary General of the Partido Comunista de Argentina (PCR) since 1968 and an international functionary of the Communist Youth in the 1950s, reports: Article 3 of the terms of admission to the Communist International permitted the Comintern to build up structures parallel to the structures of the (legal or illegal) communist parties which exercised actual leadership in the


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activities of these parties. The center of the parallel structure to the communist parties was headed by Osip Pyatnitsky from the Comintern’s International Liaison Department (OMS), which was referred to as the ”heart of the Comintern.” This department’s representatives had de facto authority over the representatives of the local CPs and increasingly were bound up with the organs of the Soviet secret services. They also coordinated training and propaganda in the Comintern and headed publications that had nothing to do with parties in the capitalist countries…. In the apparatus of the Communist International, the International Control Commission of the Executive Committee of the Comintern played a very important role. Victorio Codovilla was one of its members from 1928 to 1935, and later was the highest ranking party leader of the CP of Argentina and of the Comintern’s South American Secretariat. These structures were linked with the secret services and special agencies of the USSR and were ultimately controlled by them. From a certain time on the secretaries of the communist parties – with the approval of the Executive Committee of the Comintern – designated a cadre of the Central Committee of each party who served as the link between the structure of the CP of the particular country and the covert structure built up and led by the International. (Otto Vargas, El marxismo y la revolución argentina [Marxism and the Argentine Revolution], Vol. II, Buenos Aires 1999, p. 57; our translation) In practice, the ideological-political and organizational independence of the communist parties was undermined or even abolished by way of these parallel structures. Democratic centralism in the Comintern acquired bureaucratic-centralist features. This had a negative impact on the work of the individual parties because little value was placed on their concrete experience and analyses in each country, and a tendency to mechanical application of strategy and tactics, a tendency to transfer the concrete experience of Russia to other countries took hold. Political mistakes and dirigism by the Executive Committee of the Comintern mainly were responsible for grave errors in the policies of the Communist Party of Germany, KPD. The Executive Committee was the initiator, for example, of the so-called RGO policy, which Willi Dickhut criticized in his book, Trade Unions and Class Struggle: The mass expulsions [from the unions] also served the aim of provoking the revolutionary

opposition to make its members form red trade unions. The revolutionary opposition could not allow itself to be taken in by such splittist policy of the reformist trade union leadership. Initially, therefore, the formation of the RGO (Revolutionäre Gewerkschaftsopposition [Revolutionary Trade-Union Opposition]) was only a loose gathering of workers who had been expelled from the unions. This was correct and necessary in order to keep this revolutionary force together. But by involving unorganized people in the RGO and by organizing economic struggles under RGO leadership, the latter took on a more solid organizational form. In several cities, red trade unions developed from them, like the United Association of the Metal Workers, United Association of the Construction Workers and the United Association of the Coal-Miners. This was a serious mistake because it began to show that the masses of the union members did not follow. (W. Dickhut, Trade Unions and Class Struggle, Neuer Weg, pp. 57-58) From this Willi Dickhut concluded: Revolutionary work in the trade unions is above all an ideological struggle to win over the union members for the revolutionary class struggle. This does not mean taking over the union apparatus by voting out the reformist leaders and replacing them by revolutionary members, because this is impossible…. To counter the reformist leadership's policy of expulsion, the communists must work with great skill in the unions and prove to be active members. It is fundamentally wrong to withdraw from the trade unions or encourage the organization of red unions affiliated to the party. Granted all difficulties connected with working in the union – it must be clear to every communist: there can be no revolution without influencing and revolutionizing the millions of trade union members. (ibid., pp. 61-62) Closely related with the sectarian RGO policy was the social-fascism theory, which likewise originated with the Comintern. Aggressive anticommunism was an essential ideological root of fascism. The adoption of aggressive anticommunism in theory and practice by the Rightist leaders of the Social-Democratic Party (SPD), however, did not make the SPD anything like a social-fascist party. Willi Dickhut pointed out the historic consequences of this wrong theory:


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Defaming all social-democrats as social-fascists destroyed existing contacts between communists and social-democrats and prevented the creation of a proletarian united front which, as a strong backbone of a broad antifascist unity of action, could have prevented Hitler from seizing power. (ibid., p. 124) Starting from the Eleventh ECCI Plenum in March/April 1931, the main thrust directed at social-democracy, which was regarded as ”moderate wing of fascism,” was even intensified. The KPD, its members waging a self-sacrificing struggle, frittered away its forces in a ”war on two fronts.” When the fascist NSDAP initiated a referendum against the social-democratic Prussian government in 1931, the KPD leadership around Ernst Thälmann was at first against the participation of the KPD and declared so publicly. The ECCI intervened and the CC KPD revised its correct decision. Even if this only succeeded with the help of an intrigue of the ultraleftists in the KPD leadership (Heinz Neumann and others) and Thälmann ultimately submitted, the fact remains that it was the political secretariat of the ECCI which pushed through this fateful sectarian change of tactics. O. Pyatnitsky∗ presented an absurd view of the events at the Twelfth ECCI Plenum (September 1932). Under the heading ”successes and achievements of the KPD” he emphasized: You know, for example, that the leadership of the party opposed taking part in the referendum on the dissolution of the Prussian Landtag. A number of party newspapers published leading articles opposing participation in that referendum. But when the Central Committee of the party jointly with the Comintern arrived at the conclusion that it was necessary to take an active part in the referendum, the German comrades in the course of a few days, roused the whole party. Not a single party, except the CPSU(B) could do that. That proves that the KPD is maneuverable. (Speech at the Twelfth ECCI Plenum, September 1932, p. 15; our translation) The subsequent justification of this horrifying sectarianism as maneuverability is a caricature of Leninism. By participating in the fascist-initiated Prussian referendum the KPD suffered a massive ∗ From 1923 to 1935 Pyatnitsky was a member of the ECCI and its secretariat, treasurer, and head of the International Liaison Department (OMS). At the Seventh World Congress he was no longer elected to the leading bodies. He was relieved of his functions in the CC CPSU(B), condemned to death in nonpublic trial and executed by firing squad in 1938.

loss of credibility; the party’s membership was confused, and the rift with the social-democratic workers became increasingly deeper. This serious tactical error of the KPD made it easier for the Rightist SPD leadership to pursue its anticommunist smear campaign and split the working class. Even after finance capital had eliminated the remnants of bourgeois democracy and set up a fascist dictatorship in Germany, the ECCI was blind to the realities. On December 2, 1933 – fully 10 months after the assumption of power by the Hitlerite fascists – with tens of thousands of communists and social-democrats already being tortured together in the concentration camps, O. Pyatnitsky declared at the Thirteenth ECCI Plenum ”that the political line and organizational policies of the Communist Party of Germany before and during the assumption of power by the fascists were entirely correct.” (XIII. Plenum des EKKI, O. Pjatnitzki, Die kommunistischen Par-teien im Kampf um die Massen [The Communist Parties in the Fight for the Masses], p. 52; our trans-lation) It was only the Seventh World Congress of the Comintern in 1935 which corrected the sectarian course and gave out a new tactical orientation to establish a united front against fascism. The errors of the national sections were justifiably criticized; there was no self-criticism by the responsible leaders of the Comintern such as Pyatnitsky or Manuilsky at the congress. How could old Bolsheviks sink so low? It can only be explained by the encroachment of the petty-bourgeois mode of thinking, a grotesque loss of a sense of reality, a desperate clinging to mistakes, a vain concern for one’s personal esteem and position. Stalin tacitly approved the change of policy, was present at the opening ceremony – that was it. Whereas Lenin took self-critical stock before the delegates of the fact that the international revolution as chain reaction failed to materialize as he had predicted, Stalin remained silent at this important hour. Manuilsky, in his report to the Seventh World Congress, still managed to cite Stalin’s wrong thesis about social-democracy being the twin brother of fascism. Stalin himself said in 1924: ”Social-Democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism” (Stalin, Works, Vol. 6, p. 294). The renunciation of open, candid, principled criticism and self-criticism irrespective of the person concerned, such as Lenin always had practiced, created a climate in which the petty-bourgeois bureaucrats formally adapted to the proletarian line, but retained their petty-bourgeois mode of thinking. However justified the criticism of the Comintern, we do not forget the Comintern’s great merits, which remain in the final analysis the most important aspect. In the 1920s it provided crucial assistance for


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the formation and development of new communist parties in many countries. With its international bolshevization campaign it provided fundamental guidance for the self-transformation of many parties into revolutionary workers’ parties. The international communist and working-class movement experienced a big upswing. The Comintern helped the KPD, for instance, to overcome serious weaknesses and deviations such as the initial fundamental rejection of participation in bourgeois elections. By 1932 ”bolshevization” made the KPD a communist mass party with up to 340,000 members and six million voters. Trotsky and his followers, in contrast, slandered and fought the Communist International. To this day the Trotskyites love to envelop themselves with the nimbus of the true advocates of the ”international revolution.” It makes you wonder though that bourgeois historiography, which normally has nothing good to say about revolutionaries, is only too pleased to court Trotsky. After Trotskyism changed from a political current within the working-class movement into an anti-party opposition of petty-bourgeois careerists, it attempted to subvert and liquidate the communist parties and their world organization. Trotskyism and its Fourth International, formed in 1938, were, as Stalin remarked, an ”advanced detachment of the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie, which is fighting against communism, against the Soviet regime, against the building of socialism in the U.S.S.R.” (Stalin, Works, Vol. 13, p. 101) Trotskyism was and is objectively an agency for sabotaging the international proletarian revolution! For the sake of objective criticism of mistakes of the Communist International, it would be wrong to consider only the subjective side. The more complicated class struggle proved in the 1920s/1930s, the more complex the interconnections became between the developing class struggle in the different imperialist countries and in the countries oppressed by imperialism and the world revolutionary process, the more unsuitable became the one-sided centralistic form of organization of the Comintern. The severe defeat of the international working-class movement at the hands of the fascist dictatorships set up in Italy, Spain, Japan and Germany should already have given cause for a self-critical review whether the Comintern still was in keeping with the times as a form of organization of the international communist and working-class movement, legitimately called into being by Lenin

in his time to organize the international revolution. Stalin himself took the initiative, though late, to call into question the outmoded form of the Communist International. Georgi Dimitrov, General Secretary of the Comintern since 1935, reports on a talk with Stalin in April 1941: One should make the communist parties completely independent parties instead of sections of the Communist International. They must become national communist parties.… They must have a communist program, must draw upon a Marxist analysis, not always look to Moscow, but solve the problems on the agenda in each country on their own.... When the communist parties have grown stronger in this way they can reestablish their international organization. (Dimitrov, Tagebücher 1933-1943, p. 374; our translation) The decision to dissolve the Comintern, taken by mutual agreement on May 23, 1943, states: The differences in the historical roads of development of each country of the world, the diverse character and even the contradiction in their social orders, the difference in the level and rate of their social and political development and finally the difference in the degree of consciousness and organization of the workers condition also the various problems which face the working class of each individual country. The entire course of events for the past quarter of a century, as well as the accumulated experiences of the Communist International, have convincingly proved that the organizational form for uniting the workers as chosen by the First Congress of the Communist International, which corresponded to the needs of the initial period of rebirth of the labor movement, more and more outlived itself in proportion to the growth of this movement and the increasing complexity of problems in each country, and that this form even became a hindrance to the further strengthening of the national workers’ parties (ibid.; our translation). After the end of the revolutionary world crisis (1923) and with the development of imperialism into state-monopoly capitalism, the form of organization as a centralist world party no longer agreed with the contents of the class struggle. During this period of imperialism the national-state character of the productive forces predominated. The class struggle in the countries of state-monopoly capitalism, but also in the


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dependent countries, the semicolonies and colonies, had to be conducted mainly within the national framework even though it was a component part of the era of proletarian world revolution. This called first of all for independent parties willing and able to concretize the theory of Marxism-Leninism by applying the dialectical method to revolutionary practice in their countries and to realize strategy and tactics according with the specific laws and conditions. In an exemplary manner the Communist Party of China under Mao Zedong’s leadership managed to achieve this with the successful new-democratic revolution. Fragmentation of the International Marxist-Leninist and Working-Class Movement Following the dissolution of the Comintern, on the initiative of the Soviet Union the Information Bureau of the Communist and Workers’ Parties (Cominform) was formed on September 30, 1947. Its objects were improved coordination of the struggle against the aggressive, anticommunist policy of imperialism, led by the USA, and the exchange of experience on problems of the construction of the people’s democracies and socialism. However, only a small section of the international communist and working-class movement was involved: the communist parties of the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia (until 1948), Albania (from 1947), France and Italy. The German Socialist Unity Party (SED) had observer status, the CP China did not join. It was not a firm organization with democratic centralism like the Comintern, but an assembly to ”organize the interchange of experience and, if need be, coordinate the activities of the Communist Parties on the basis of mutual agreement” (Founding Communiqué; our translation). Even though the Communist Information Bureau (1947-1956) never attained the importance of the Comintern, because of its tough attitude towards Anglo-American imperialism and its ideological irreconcilability it was a thorn in the side of the revisionists. Khrushchov dissolved the Cominform in April 1956, immediately after the Twentieth Party Congress, in a surprise attack, in order to pave the way for reconciliation with the revisionist Tito and appease US imperialism. At the international meetings of the communist and workers’ parties (Moscow 1957 and Bucharest 1960) his only interest was now to spread the revisionist line of the CPSU. Nevertheless, the representatives of the Communist Party of China and the Party of Labor of Albania defended Marxism-Leninism against modern revisionism. Starting with open attacks on the Chinese and Albanian Marxist-Leninists at the Moscow

meeting, the Soviet leaders exerted enormous pressure on the other parties and abused the international structures and relations to enforce revisionism. Beginning in 1963 the CP China conducted a public polemic against the revisionist betrayal. It climaxed in 1963 in the Proposal for a General Line of the International Communist Movement, which defended the teachings of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin against the modern revisionists and continued to adhere to revolutionary class struggle. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1966 was the creative advancement of the strategy and tactics of class struggle in socialism, a successful mass movement to counter the danger of revisionist degeneration of the CP China and the restoration of capitalism in China. In the wake of these events in China, everywhere in the world new Marxist-Leninist organizations and parties emerged. Mao Zedong’s China became the center of the international Marxist-Leninist and working-class movement. At the time the Communist Party of China was against an international form of organization for the Marxist-Leninists and maintained solely bilateral relationships. At first this was an effective precautionary measure to protect the organizations from interference by the Soviet revisionists and promote their independence. Mao Zedong himself warned the representatives of other parties again and again not to mechanically follow the Chinese model and strongly urged them to use their own heads. On this basis, the KABD, the forerunner organization of the MLPD, was able to diagnose, shortly after Mao Zedong’s death in 1976: The Chinese Leadership Sails in the Right Deviationist Wind. From the start the MLPD exposed the subsequent restoration of capitalism in China and at the same time defended Mao Zedong Thought against the attacks of the Hoxha clique. This was done while a worldwide wave of liquidationism raged, which resulted in hundreds of splits, collapses and self-dissolutions of Marxist-Leninist parties and organizations and to this day has left deep wounds in many countries. International Forms of Organization for Coordinating and Revolutionizing the Class Struggles With the reorganization of international production beginning in the 1990s, with the emergence of an international industrial proletariat, the process from a predominantly national form of class struggle towards international class struggle has gathered


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speed. The tendency towards the internationalization of class struggle only can mature into a victorious international revolution if the working class, across national frontiers, coordinates and revolutionizes the struggles raging in the world. This is impossible without international forms of organization. The negative experiences of the old communist movement do not, however, justify skepticism and rejection of all forms of firm international structures. The International Conference of Marxist-Leninist Parties and Organizations (ICMLPO) originated in 1988 as an important forum for the ideological-political exchange of views among the participating organizations on a basis of equality. The Fourth Resolution of the Eighth International Conference in 2004 characterizes how the ICMLPO sees itself: Participation in the International Conference is based on the following main criteria: • Adherence to Marxism-Leninism and Mao

Zedong Thought and their creative application in the conduct of the class struggle in each country.

• Struggle against modern revisionism and a positive attitude towards Stalin and Mao Zedong.

• Acceptance of the Rules of the Conference. The 4th Conference adopted the following principles on which the cooperation of the participating Marxist-Leninist organizations is based, which were amended and again adopted at the 8th Conference: • Independence and equality, mutual respect,

mutual support and cooperation . • Noninterference in internal affairs as well as

in the bilateral or regional relations of any party or organization with other parties and organizations. Every organization is sovereign in its conclusions.

• Consensus and unanimity in decision-making. • Achieving gradual unity step by step;

principled debate and cooperation among parties/organizations and no public attack by any party/organization on another.

• Obligation of all participating organizations to prepare and conduct the 9th International Conference jointly in accordance with their possibilities.

• Financial independence and self-financing of the common work according to the possibilities. (Resolution No. 4 of the 8th ICMLPO, INL No. 29)

In their dialectical unity the principles of cooperation are an expression of the proletarian culture of debate. If this culture prevails, the process of

gradual unification can make progress. The character of the International Conference as forum for discussion, without binding agreements for practice, simultaneously underscores its limitations. For the preparation of the international revolution, international forms of organization are required which conform to the character of the present tasks in the preparation of the international revolution. The complexity of the international revolution; the course of the struggles, differing from country to country and not developing in straight lines; the different characters and scopes of the revolutionary movements; the diversity of the forms of organization and struggle; the specific complexities of history, culture and mentality – all that makes a monolithic international form of organization out of the question. The indissoluble interaction of the struggles and movements, the inner connectedness of the struggles across national borders, the necessity of opposing a superior force of the international revolution to the international cooperation of the imperialists in organizing the counterrevolution – all that calls for a system of international forms of organization for coordinating and revolutionizing the struggles of the working-class and people’s movements. The leading factor for uniting the class struggles in the individual countries into an international class struggle is the close cooperation of parties and organizations on a revolutionary basis. An organization for this purpose could be a kind of international league of revolutionary and Marxist-Leninist parties that has an underlying continental structure so that existent regional initiatives and meetings on the various continents also could be embedded in it. Such an international league should not be a new Communist International, but an organization on a basis of equality. That implies the independence of each participating organization as regards the strategy and tactics of the class struggle in the particular country, as well as involving binding practical agreements on the cross-border coordination and revolutionization of the struggles and mutual support in party building. At the same time each party commits itself to making a contribution of its choosing and is responsible for making that contribution. #

20th of May 2007


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Country Report India CPI (ML) Central Committee, India

1. Six decades after the transfer of power in 1947, under imperialist globalization the contradiction between imperialism and the Indian people, the contradiction between feudalism and broad masses of people and the contradiction between capital and labour have unprecedentedly sharpened reflecting the growing plunder and suppression by imperialism and the comprador ruling classes on the one hand, and the resistance against them by the working class, the peasantry and all other oppressed masses and sections, on the other hand. Under the neo-liberal regime hundreds of thousands of industrial units were closed down, the public sector enterprises were fully or almost privatized, unemployment has reached alarming scale, all trade union and democratic rights are usurped away, education, health-care, etc. are privatized and being made beyond the reach of common people, prices of essential commodities are soaring up and the vast masses of people are facing devastation. The so-called IMF-World Bank-WTO dictated development has only made the 5-10% of the elite classes super-rich. These sharp realities have reached explosive situation with the introduction of hundreds of Special Economic Zones (SEZs) which are neo-colonial enclaves within the country, Agro Economic Zones (AEZs) intensifying further transfer of agricultural land for 'corporate farming', opening of retail sector also for corporate houses and MNCs, etc. with the people left with no other option but to resist with all their might, which they are now doing in ever-increasing scale. 2. In the political sphere, all the political parties including the right reactionary and communal ones like Congress and BJP to the so-called 'left' parties led by CPI (M) which are in power at centre and in the states are basically united in speeding up the implementation of imperialist globalization policies. In order to divert the toiling masses from revolting, communal, casteist, parochial feelings are aroused to create vote banks. At the same time imperialism led by US imperialism is making further inroads in to all sphere of the country's life. In this situation only the communist revolutionary forces who uncompromisingly oppose all ruling class policies including imperialist globalization can provide leadership to the struggle against imperialism, comprador bureaucratic bourgeois classes and the landlord classes and the political parties representing them. Only the communist revolutionary forces can provide correct revolutionary orientation to the masses, unite all anti-imperialist and anti-ruling class forces and build up a people's alternative to the ruling system. To realize this, the unity of all genuine

revolutionary forces and bringing them together in a single communist party is the need of the hour. 3. It was with this objective the erstwhile CPI (ML) and CPI (ML) Red Flag had formed a Co-ordination Committee with the purpose of uniting in to a single organization before the time of the 8th ICMLPO. Organizing the International Conference of Marxist-Leninist Parties with the slogan "Against Imperialism, Socialism is the Only Alternative" at the time of World Social Forum at Mumbai in January 2004 and other joint activities with the resolve to uncompromisingly fight right opportunism and 'left' sectarian trends led to preparation of joint documents and later declaration of unity in to a single organization, CPI(ML), in Vijayawada Unity Conference during 27th January to 1st February, 2005. This was a significant step towards the unity of Marxist-Leninist forces in India. 4. The unity took place based on four documents: Outline of Party Program, Party Constitution, Political Resolution and Unity Resolution. The Outline of Party Programme stated: "The historic developments and concrete conditions of the country determine the present stage of revolution which is New Democratic. The CPI (ML) which upholds Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse Tung Thought as its guiding ideology and seeks to apply it to the concrete conditions of India and to integrate it with the concrete practice of Indian revolution, uncompromisingly struggling against both revisionist and sectarian tendencies of all hues, is committed to complete the New Democratic Revolution. The task before the party in the stage of the New Democratic Revolution is to overthrow the rule of comprador bureaucratic bourgeois-landlord classes serving imperialism and to replace the present reactionary Indian state with the New Democratic or People Democratic state led by the proletariat and based on the worker-peasant alliance. The basic program of the party is to complete the tasks of the NDR with agrarian revolution as its axis and to advance towards Socialist Revolution, to the realization of socialism and communism.

"The path of New Democratic Revolution in India is based on the concrete conditions in our country, taking the experience of all hitherto revolutions in the world and the people's revolutionary movements in our country. Rejecting parliamentary cretinism and the line of individual terrorism, and upholding the revolutionary mass line, we resolves to utilize all forms of struggles and organizations to seize political power by overthrowing the Indian State through armed means. Strategic united front of all


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revolutionary classes and forces with the working class as the leading force and the peasantry as the main force based on worker-peasant alliance as well as necessary tactical united fronts should be developed for furthering the people's revolutionary movement." "The CPI (ML) is engaged in a strenuous struggle for uniting the communist revolutionary force. In the real sense, it is the historic task of reorganizing the communist movement itself, uniting the genuine communists in our country and paving the way for the building of the Communist Party which is capable of leading the New Democratic Revolution in a country of more than 100 crores of people." 5. While the Party Constitution provided the guidelines to build a Bolshevik style party organization based on the principle of democratic centralism, the Unity Resolution stated:

"2. The international scene is marked by the intensifying frenzied hegemonic aggressions and machinations along with the imperialist globalization by imperialism, especially US imperialism, on the one hand, and the ever growing protests, movements, resistance struggles and uprisings by the world proletariat and all oppressed people and nations of the world, on the other. This shows that we are still in the era of imperialism and proletarian revolution.

"3. The noose of imperialist globalization is tightening around our country affecting the economy, the polity, military and social life, threatening the very sovereignty of our country. Though the government has changed, the basic policies continue to be the same, and despite rosy promises the plight and miseries of the people are aggravating. Even the communal threat remains. Against these the people are becoming more and more restive and their protests are growing.

"4. The semi-feudal agrarian relations continue to be prevalent in large parts of our country. Existing land reform laws are being watered down to suit the landlord class, Indian corporate houses and the MNCs. Vast masses of peasantry and rural poor are being exploited and oppressed by the landlords and the market forces leading to pauperization of the peasant masses on large scale. This situation coupled with recurring droughts and floods have created a deep crisis for the agricultural sector and acute misery for the rural masses.

"5. Indian ruling classes and their organizations, especially the Sangh Parivar, are using communalism to divide our society to suit their objective of furthering the exploitation and oppression of working people coming from all religions and sections of society. They are inciting communal carnages as was witnessed in Gujarat.

Some political parties are fomenting open caste hatred and caste based politics in the name of social justice.

National chauvinism is also being propagated by the ruling classes and their political parties to suppress the just demands and aspirations of the national minorities in our country as is witnessed in Manipur, J&K, etc.

This situation calls for the need of a strong and powerful movement against the ruling system, uniting all sections and strata of the working people for equality and emancipation from exploitation and oppression. The Communist Revolutionary forces must be in the forefront of this struggle.

"6. This situation calls for the building up of the broadest possible platform of the working class, the peasantry, the women, the youth and students and all other oppressed classes and sections against the Congress-led UPA Government at the Centre, the BJP-led NDA and various state Governments including 'Left Front' Governments. The historic task of the communist revolutionary forces is to unite all these classes and sections and launch a powerful revolutionary movement against the ruling system.

"7. To carry forward this task, we, the Communist Revolutionaries, are to unite all the patriotic, democratic and genuine left forces. In this context, we are to take every step to consolidate and strengthen our party, CPI(ML), politically and organizationally and expand our class/mass organizations. "8. We, therefore, appeal to the Communist Revolutionary forces to close their ranks and unite into a single party of the Indian proletariat guided by Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought, waging relentless struggles against both revisionism and sectarianism of all shades to carry forward this historic task." 6. The Political Resolution defined the International Tasks of the party as follows:

"1. Awaken and arouse the Indian people against imperialist globalization and aggressive doctrine of pre-emptive strike of Bush-Blair combine threatening the national sovereignty and independence of the countries of the world.

"2. Develop anti-imperialist movements against the invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan and support the ongoing resistance struggles in these countries against occupation. Support the Palestinian people struggle for national liberation.

"3. Develop the solidarity movement of Indian people with the ongoing movement of the world people against imperialism and war.


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"4. Combat all anti-Communist propaganda unleashed by imperialists and their henchmen. Launch ideological offensive based on Marxism-Leninism-Mao-Tsetung Thought and Proletarian Internationalism. "5. Strive to develop understanding and relations with the Marxist-Leninist forces, left forces and other anti-imperialist forces at international level. Strive to build up united movements with forces against imperialism, especially US imperialism and world reaction. 7. It defined the National Tasks as follows: "1.Struggle against the existing semi-feudal agrarian relations and the growing penetration of imperialism and its agencies in the agrarian sector and launch a country-wide agrarian revolutionary movement against landlordism, imperialism and all its agencies.

"2.Strive to build up a country-wide united working class movement against the fierce all round attacks by imperialism and the big bourgeoisie.

"3. Expose and oppose Congress led UPA government and arouse, mobilize and lead the people in the struggle against its anti-national, anti-people policies. Continue to expose, oppose, and fight against BJP-led NDA and Sangh Parivar against their polices of surrender before imperialism and communalism.

"4. Unmask and oppose the pro-ruling class and anti-people policies of the CPI (M) led 'Left Front'.

"5.Intensify the ideological, political struggle against social democracy and sectarian anarchist tendencies.

"6. Expose and oppose the regional and so-called social justice parties who are serving the ruling classes betraying the people whom they claim to represent.

"7. Fight for protection and extension of democratic rights.

"8. Launch a powerful peoples movement against the pro-landlord, pro-imperialist and anti-people policies of the ruling class governments serving the cause of imperialism.

"9. Strive to build All India Working Class, peasant and other class/ mass Organizations in accordance with the concrete situation.

Communist revolutionary forces close ranks and unite to fulfil the historic task of leading the working class and all oppressed classes and sections against the ruling system in the anti-imperialist, anti-feudal struggles towards Peoples' Democracy and advance towards Socialism." 8. Contrary to the counter-revolutionary propaganda of the enemy forces predicting breaking down of the this unity, during last two and half years the unity has strengthened, taking up numerous people's struggles, and consolidating the organization and spreading it to more areas. It has enabled the party to carry forward the tasks within the country with more vigor, while taking up the international tasks of helping the unity of the Marxist-Leninist forces and carrying forward international solidarity actions.

25th June, 2007#

Contribution to the International Conference

The Struggle of the International Working Class, the Anti-imperialist Struggles of the Peoples,

and Marxist-Leninist Party Building CPI(ML) India

The present international situation is marked by further intensification of the contradiction between imperialism, especially US imperialism, and oppressed peoples and nations of the world. The imposition of imperialist globalization based on neo-liberal policies during last 2-3 decades by the imperialist forces through various agencies like IMF, World Bank and WTO, the ever-intensifying monopolization of capital while it takes speculative character increasingly, and the plunder of Multi-National Corporations (MNCs) and corporate giants, along with the imperialist

brand of development perspective, is accelerating the devastation of the nature and ever-increasing number of world people. It is leading to neo-colonization in all spheres.

Imperialism, particularly US imperialism, is intensifying the plunder and oppression in the main utilizing the services of the comprador ruling system in the semi-colonial, neo-colonial countries. This has given rise to intensification of various forms of people's resistance to imperialists and the comprador ruling classes in these countries.


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Wherever the ruling system in these countries is not bowing down to the dictates of the imperialists, especially US imperialists, they conspire to overthrow them and unleash naked aggressions occupying these countries. During the last decade it was witnessed in the US-led imperialist interference and aggressions leading to disintegration of Yugoslavia. In this decade the aggression and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, the occupation of Palestine through Zionist Israel, the threat of aggressions against Iran, Syria, North Korea like countries and the aggressive military interference in a large number of countries of West Asia, Africa and South East Asia in the name of so-called 'war on terrorism', etc. have increasingly exposed the heinous and pernicious character of the US-led imperialist powers. But these interferences, bullying, aggressions and occupations are facing increasing resistance from the popular forces as in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, etc. US imperialists are caught in a quagmire in Iraq, facing the threat of a Vietnam like ignominious withdrawal.

What is being witnessed in increasing number of Latin American countries is new type of people's offensive against US imperialist plunder, bullying and interferences. While Cuba continues to firmly uphold its anti-US imperialist positions, the popular regimes in Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Equador like countries have thrown out neo-liberal policies, nationalizing its natural resources and enterprises, and trying to provide a better livelihood for the masses.

The popular upsurge sweeping across Latin America has weakened the stranglehold of US imperialists in this region. It is providing hope for a revolutionary offensive in this region in coming days.

The attack of the bourgeoisie around the world on the workers and all toiling masses through flexibilisation of work, extension of working hours without wage compensation, wage cuts, increasing of retirement age, cuts in social welfare, health-care and education system, occupation of vast agricultural lands in the name of industrialization, etc. have intensified the contradiction between capital and labour to unprecedented levels.

The struggle of the Working class everywhere including in the imperialist countries against the deterioration of working and living conditions and against the dismantling of economic and democratic rights is developing.

Contrary to what was witnessed in the early 1990s when US-led imperialist forces had mounted a

vicious counter-revolutionary offensive chanting "end of history", "end of class struggle", "socialism has become obsolete" like slogans when Soviet Union had disintegrated, and when the international working class movement and national liberation struggles had suffered severe setbacks, the situation has changed internationally. Once again the struggle of the working class and oppressed peoples and nations are developing giving rise to the hope of a new revolutionary upsurge.

It is in this context the importance of Marxist-Leninist party building should be viewed. During the 1960s under the impact of increasing domination of Soviet revisionism which degenerated most of the communist parties to bureaucratic bourgeois organizations on the one hand, and under the influence of various 'left' sectarian adventurist tendencies, especially the emergence of Lin Bioaist sectarian positions which dominated the CPC during its 1969 Ninth Congress advocating the change of present era from the Leninist concept to one of "total collapse of imperialism and world wide victory of socialism", the concept of Bolshevik style Marxist-Leninist party building surrounded by class/mass organizations and based on democratic centralism had suffered severe setbacks. Through a process of rectification the Marxist-Leninist parties are trying to overcome the deviation. Only by speeding up this process the present problems faced by the movement including uncompromising struggle against both right opportunism and 'left' deviations, struggle against all alien tendencies and ideologies like post-Marxism, post-modernism, etc., struggle against NGO ideology and practice, mobilization and politicization of working class and all other oppressed classes and sections, etc. can be effectively carried forward. As the historical experience and concrete conditions differ in each country, this rectification process and party building should be taken up accordingly. ICMLPO should be viewed as a platform for exchange of experience, for learning from each other.

The progress achieved in Marxist-Leninist party building around the world shall create favorable conditions for coming together of these parties based on proletarian internationalism and through evaluation of the experience of the First, Second and Third Internationals, Cominform and the post-Cominform period. It shall create conditions for bringing together all genuine Marxist-Leninist


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parties and organizations within ICMLPO and for consolidating it as an international platform of

Marxist-Leninist Parties.

CPI (ML), Central Committee

The Development of the International Conference of Marxist-Leninist Parties and Organisations (ICMLPO) and

Preparation of the 10th International Conference.

In general we agree with the following main criteria for participation in the International Conference as approved by the 8th International Conference.

1. Adherence to Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought and their creative application in the conduct of the class struggle in each country.

2. Struggle against modern revisionism, and a positive attitude towards Stalin and Mao.

3. Acceptance of the Rules of the Conference.

The 4th Conference adopted the following principles on which the co-operation of the participating Marxist-Leninist organisations is based, which were amended and again adopted at the 7th Conference.

1. Independence and equality, mutual respect, mutual support and co-operation.

2. Non-interference in internal affairs as well as in the bilateral or regional relations or any party or organisation with other parties and organisations. Every organisation is sovereign in its conclusions

3. Consensus and unanimity in decision-making.

4. Achieve gradual unity step by step; principled debate and co-operation among parties/organisations and no public attack by any party/organisation on another.

5. Obligation of all participating organisations to prepare and conduct the 8th International Conference jointly in accordance with their possibilities.

6. Financial independence and self-financing of the common work according to the possibilities.

But we are of the view that the second criteria should be redefined as follows:

Struggle against modern revisionism and all shades of right opportunism on the one hand, and against all forms of 'left' sectarian and anarchist tendencies which goes against all tenets of revolutionary mass line and Bolshevik style party building, on the other.

Add the following criteria also:

Actively participate in all international solidarity actions called by the JCG of the ICMLPO in consultation with all participating organisations, with a view to consciously strengthen the unity of international working class and all oppressed peoples.

Central Committee

CPI (ML)

______________________________________________________________________________________________________


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History of the Party ”Hezbe Ranjbaran Iran”

”Hezbe Ranjbaran Iran” was founded on comrade ”Mao’s” birthday on 26 December 1979 out of a solidarity movement consisting of 9 Marxist-Leninist groups (1st congress). The best-known and largest group in this constellation was ”Sazeman Enghelabi” (revolutionary organization) which was created in the year 1964 after the separation and splitting within the ”Tudeh Party” abroad. This separation had become necessary after the ideological struggle within the party against revisionist views of the Tudeh party. This organization rated the roll of Iran in the democratic revolution and focussed on creating a people’s army and the people’s struggle in the revolution and made two armed rebellions against the Shah regime in the South and in the West of Iran which however were not successful. After the defeat of these two rebellions it took another way; the contact to the workers and peasants and the social movements and at the same moment establishing a communist party in Iran became a people’s duty from a proletarian point of view. The foundation of the revolutionary organization was at the time when the Shah regime began to carry out a so-called land reform in Iran according to the plans of US-imperialism, so that the broad people’s movement in the villages was put down and US-imperialism got away with it. About 10 years after the establishment of the ”Revolutionary Organization” the leadership of this organization which had secretly moved to Iran made a survey of the different views after the so-called land reform and drew the conclusion that the Iranian society was getting a period over and done with it and was defeating the comprador bourgeoisie. But the comrades and a part of the leadership of the ”Revolutionary Organization” and due to the execution of these comrades by the Shah regime in the years 1975 – 1976 this line could not be put through. According to the three-world-theory as strategic proletarian line on a worldwide level and after the death of Mao in 1976 the leadership of the ”Revolutionary Organization” followed this revisionist view and supported the Islamic regime in Iran 1979 using the danger of the two superpowers USA and USSR as a pretext. A year after the foundation of the ”Revolutionary Organization” in 1981 the leadership and the central

committee of the organization criticised their opportunistic attitude concerning the Iranian regime and put its destruction on the agenda. They prepared the 2nd congress to criticise the old attitude concerning the Iranian regime and to give reasons for the change of their view. But in June 1981 the Islamic regime increased its attacks against them and deprived them of the opportunity to put through this change. Meanwhile the organization concentrated on the North, South and West of the country and was preparing an armed rebellion against the regime, and there were armed clashes with the troops devoted to the regime in the South of the country. The lack of a broad people’s support in the North and South of the country brought the result that these clashes lasted only a few months. In Kurdistan, however, where the support existed, the organization could continue its partisan war against the Islamic regime until 1989. During the preparatory phase of the 2nd congress in 1982 and as the regime was taking action against everybody a big splitting took place within the party which weakened it very much. One wing of the leadership expressed its opposition with the official attitude of the party, believing one should rather approach the broad masses and support them during the oppression by the regime. The leadership of the party, however, was of the opinion that one should follow a dual-track policy, i.e. to wage armed struggle against the regime and at the same time to take notice of the broad masses and to protect the organization from the police. This weakening of the party led to comrades belonging to the leadership being persecuted by the police, arrested and executed. One part of the leadership who believed in the dual-track policy was also weakened, persecuted, arrested, tortured and executed and thus the whole leadership was weakened. So in the time between the two congresses many comrades of the leadership were executed. But also a number of our cadres and comrades suffered the same fate. Other organs like e.g. the women’s organization, youth organization, artist organization were stormed by the police in 1980 and declared as illegal organization and as a result dispersed. The 2nd congress was held in 1984. The opportunists were criticised and avoided in this congress because


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they defended the interests of the Islamic regime and agreed to the three-world-theory. Moreover the Iranian society was rated as a capitalist society and the working class as the backbone of the revolution. But due to the existing of a rest of feudalism, the unequal and unjust treatment of women, the influence of the religion on the government, the oppression of liberal national movements the Iranian revolution was still called democratic to some extent. These outside demands within a society, being covered with contradictions and appearing between proletariat and bourgeoisie, could be reached by proletarians with a socialist revolution. After the 2nd congress the armed struggle of the party against the regime in Kurdistan had quasi come to a standstill since 1990, because the Iraqi regime was permanently bombing our positions. So the leadership of the party was forced to leave the country and to go to Europe. In the 3rd congress – October/November 2006 – the Iranian revolution was rated as a socialist revolution. Another change was the so-called ”scientific communism” as signpost of the party. This signpost had the following definition: ”The theory of scientific communism being created by Marxism is the only revolutionary school against the different forms of the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie. Marxism reached its full flowering in the course of its practical use at first by Marx and afterwards by Mao.” But ”Leninism basically was Marxism of the early imperialist era and the time of the proletarian revolution”. There was only a dogmatic definition of the theory of proletarian revolution by comrade ”Stalin”. In principal this theory is structured dialectically and has to be completed and added in collaboration with the proletariat. As long as imperialism exists, one cannot claim that the theory of the proletarians did not develop. The questioning of comrade ”Lin Piao” concerning the train of thought of comrade ”Mao” is just the same that Marxism-Leninism would not be the right way in the time of the fall of imperialism and the victory of socialism. Thise questioning is driving a wedge into the camp of the proletariat and preparing the ground for anarchistic, opportunistic and revisionist questioning within the revolutionary Marxism. The party ”Hezbe ranjbaran Iran” thinks that imperialism has been entering a new phase on a worldwide level since the 70ties of last century in which the national monopolistic capital is proceeding in the direction of expansion, and today we find the imperialistic competition being increased and extended and at the same time limited and accelerated.

So globalization of the capital is leading to an extension of the proletarian world revolution. The weak links have grown now. The proletarian revolution is going over from a ”national revolution in one country” to a ”regional revolution”. This is why the proletariat has to meet, communicate and act in solidarity on a worldwide level. Imperialism is in an inflationary phase and now is only able to act with violence to have its way. It can only oppress the peoples in its surroundings with violence and it cannot be controlled any more. Concerning the three contradictions we mentioned the one of the peoples is the most important, namely the contradiction in the ranks of the proletariat, the oppressed peoples against imperialism and national backwardness are still of relevance to the present. But the two other contradictions, namely the contradiction in the ranks of the proletariat in the imperialist countries, the contradiction in the ranks of the ”super-national monopolies” are merging into one and are still too small. So the proletariat in the world especially in the developed capitalistic countries has to take action against this. It has to oppose to it and take action so that the struggle of the peoples against the imperialists and the inner backwardness will be continued. The right-wing revisionism (old, modern, three-world and post-modernism) and the left-wing (Trotskyists, pseudo-Trotskyists, anarchists etc.) thus have weakened the communist movement, and after a quarter of a century it is leaving behind this phase of standstill. So out of this reason and in addition with the general weakness of imperialism, growing of the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie in the peripheral countries a state has developed in which the non-proletarian classes even further struggle for their share of the cake. The cheap labor in these countries is suppressed. This caused these classes to oppose imperialism to a certain extent (e.g. in Latin America, in the Middle East and in parts of Africa) so that the current tendency in the world is not more likely running with proletarian movements or oppressed peoples under the rule of communism but in the peripheral countries the leadership is put in the bourgeoisie’s and petty-bourgeoisie’s hands. Nevertheless we are of the opinion that the solidarity of the communists in the countries and in the regions is able to change this situation and again bring the proletariat to the head against imperialism and capitalism. After what we mentioned before we add that new live has to be put into the world movement ”communism” according to the view of ”Lenin” concerning the ”unity on basic questions” and the important aspects and tactics. These points are above all:


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1. Adoption of scientific communism as theoretical basis going together with Marxism and further developing besides the practical revolution and progressing by ”Lenin” and ”Mao” in the merging process of theory and practice in the single countries and regions.

2. Three contradictions are still the most important subjects: The contradiction of the proletarians and the oppressed peoples against imperialism and the inner backwardness.

3. Neo-liberalism and imperialism of the super-nationalists leads capitalism into a new phase. US-imperialism is about to loose its endeavours for hegemony.

4. The struggle against the imperialistic endeavours is the duty of the communists in the world and will foil the plan ”to create a big empire in the Middle East” under the leadership of the USA and the Zionist state. Stand up against the war plans of the imperialists.

5. Defending the ”struggle of the oppressed peoples” is a central column of the world proletariat.

6. The communists should interfere to an increased extent in the efforts of the workers and oppressed and be involved in the movements of the masses and get active in bringing about workers’ organizations as these circumstances are without any doubt the circumstances for their growth and the growth of parties and organizations of communism.

7. Founding of communist united parties in the world and their cooperation with the workers’ organizations and movements and harmonizing activities in the region and on a worldwide level belong to the duties of the communists.

8. Founding of the Communist International is also a necessity to harm sectarianism and forming groups and to strengthen the proletariat.

9. The other necessities are to add up the reasons of the defeat of socialism and to correct errors and solidarity concerning views.

Workers of the world unite! Long live the proletarian revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat! Long live the proletarian international!

Victory to the 9th conference of some parties and organizations of Marxism-Leninism! Dedicated to the 9th Conference of Marxist-Leninist Parties and Organizations. Hezbe Ranjbaran Iran June 2007 #


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Country Report Italy Party of the Committees to Support Resistance –

for Communism (CARC) – Italy

In the latest two years in Italy, there are been many significant events for Communist movement's rebirth and for the development of popular masses' struggle. On October 2004, it was founded the (new) Italian Communist Party ((n)PCI), as a clandestine party. On November 2004, the Statement of its foundation affirmed that the Party "was born in order to complete the work the first Italian Communist Party let unfinished, that is to make Italy a new socialist country and so to contribute to the world proletarian revolution." The (n)PCI declared that its task was to resume the way begun by the first Italian Communist Party (PCI, the party of Antonio Gramsci), constituted in 1921. That party carried out a heroic resistance against Fascism, gaining consideration and support by the working class, until it take the direction of the popular masses and led them to victory in the Resistance (1945). However, starting from the Fifties, owing to internal and international factors and to its own errors and limits, in the party the modern revisionists led by Togliatti prevailed. They have led again the popular masses under imperialist bourgeoisie's direction and the party to corruption, desegregation and dissolution. The birth of (n)PCI started a debate within the CARC, that ended in the Spring of 2005. The CARC recognized the (n)PCI as the embryo of future headquarters of the working class, and gave it their full trust. Afterwards, on April 2005, an Extraordinary Congress sanctioned the transformation of the CARC. They were an organization working for the reconstruction of the communist party. Then they became a party that has brought Communists to enter again in a field let to bourgeois and revisionist parties for years, the field of bourgeois political struggle. This was a particular task within the general struggle carried out by the (n)PCI, for making Italy a new socialist country. The CARC believe necessary to carry out the work in this front of the struggle, where the Communists are almost completely absent, because this front involves, interests and mobilizes a very great part of Italian popular masses. It is the field

of the electoral campaigns, the activity of Parliament and other elective Assemblies, the campaigns of public opinion’s orientation, the demonstration and the strikes organized by the bourgeois organizations. The CARC enter in this field of struggle for defending the freedom of political and social action conquered by the Resistance against Nazi. Fascism and for showing to the widest masses that popular masses’ and imperialist bourgeoisie’s interests are not compatible. In fact, the bourgeoisie has answered to the initiative of our Party with a hard and continuous repression, with inquiries, house searches, sequestration of computers and documents, defamatory campaigns through the media. All this demonstrates that the bourgeoisie want to carry out its electoral theatre without the Communists, because their presence in that theatre shows how fake its democracy is. In these two years we saw the end of the government of Berlusconi's gang. Berlusconi didn't succeed in carrying out the program assigned to him by the class that really rules our country (the imperialist bourgeoisie, constituted by industrials, bankers, Vatican, US imperialists and Mafia). According to this program he had to dig as deeper and more quickly as possible into workers’ and popular masses’ conquests. Wide workers and popular masses’ struggles wrecked the bourgeoisie’s plans and overwhelmed Berlusconi’s gang. The most significant struggles were at Scansano, against the incinerator, at the FIAT of Melfi, in Susa Valley, against the construction of the High Speed Railway, and the one carried out by the tram drivers in Milan. After Berlusconi’s fall, the government of Centre Left Circus began. Its leaders are Prodi, ex Christian – Democrat, D’Alema, ex member of the revisionist Italian Communist Party, Bertinotti, ex trade unionist leader, and Epifani, leader of the CGIL, the greatest Italian trade union. They are trying to be successful in what Berlusconi failed. The current events completely confirm our thesis according to which Centre Left and Centre Right have the same common program. Prodi’s


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government hopes to realize it by different methods, not by the Berlusconi’s arrogance, not fighting the trade unions of the regime. For the first time it directly involves all the parties of bourgeois Left and the so called Communists, who got many

Ministries and the Presidency of Chamber of Deputies. Besides, Prodi’s government got agreement and support by the trade unions of the

regime, particularly by the CGIL and its secretary Epifani, and creates very profitable jobs and positions for thousands of exponents of working class’ aristocracy. On the international level, the US imperialist and their allies are suffering defeats facing the popular masses’ resistance in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and Lebanon, communist parties are carrying out revolutionary popular wars in Nepal, Philippines, India, Turkey, and a strong anti-imperialist movement is growing in Latin America and all over the world. The rebirth of the popular and communist movement advances everywhere and in this situation the principal task of Italian Communists and other vanguard struggling people and organizations is to carry out the mobilization against the imperialist bourgeoisie’s common program. This is the only way for preventing Prodi from doing what Berlusconi’s gang wasn’t able to do. Owing to the corruption and desegregation carried out by Centre Left parties and trade unions of the regime among the workers and the popular masses,

we need a qualitative leap in order to struggle effectively against the Prodi’s government. We believe that this qualitative leap is the development of a popular front politics, struggling against the bourgeoisie’s common program, for defending and extending workers and popular masses’ rights and conquests in every field, that is in political, cultural, social and trade union fields. In order to do it we need to build a more ramified and strong organization of the popular masse, really politically and ideologically independent from the bourgeoisie. We need to give more determined and farsighted political objectives to every struggle of resistance and popular aggregate. These advanced objectives are summed up in the slogans ”let’s make Italy a new socialist country” and ”rebirth of the international communist movement”. Free and open confrontation, unity in the struggle and class solidarity are the words indicating the process of transformation and strengthening of the struggle against imperialism and for socialism, in our country, in our international relations, and within the international communist movement.#

29th of April 2007

____________________________________________________________________________________________ Party of the Committees to Support Resistance – for Communism (CARC) - Italy Via Tanaro, 7 - 20128 Milano – Tel/Fax 02.26306454 e-mail: [email protected] – website: www.carc.it

National Direction – International Relations Department Tel. +39 0226306454 – e-mail: [email protected]


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Country Report Panama United front, class and party

PC(ML) Panama

The fact that an uncritical evaluation of the party congress of FRENADESO was elaborated in the last edition of “El mundo del trabajo" raised some objections against us: "too much correspondence", "you support sectarianism and avant-gardism". A terrible sin, if it was true. But it is absolutely not. We were among the first to gather the left parties and organizations in order to prepare a people's counter offensive to stop oligarchic Second Republic which has been established meanwhile . So the assembly of the Panamanian Left (MEIP) arose, which had promoted the efforts for a unity of action of these organizations and the labor movement for one year. Some supported it honestly and identified themselves with iitt, other mentioned this or that excuse and refused their participation: this was the case with “Buscando Camino", “Movimiento Popular Unificado" as well as the “Partido del Pueblo". The MEIP did not succeed in taking on its role fully; iitt was disbanded without any explanation by “Propuesta Socialista" and the PAT, the same ones who had accused it of this sin of “sectarianism" and "insurgent avant-guardism". So far the facts. Our organization thought and repeated pointed out, that in order to stop the neofascist offensive, it is urgently necessary to pay full attention to the political task of constructing a broad united front of the workers from the basis. Such a united front should, with the unions as a fundamental basis and relying on the alliance of workers and farmers, organize and unite all revolutionary, democratic and patriotic political forces of the people against their cruel enemies, the big bourgeoisie and the imperialism . The MLN-29 itself decided to give birth to and support its own united front, based on its own experience in mass struggles. That is why she got the critical pointed remarks, maintaining the it practices “sectarianism" and ”does not know how to build unity", as well as the well-known gibe about its " avant-guardism ". We ask, however, whether it is not actually the Party of the People that is "avant-guardistic"? Is the Party of the Workers which is being built up not “avant-guardistic"? And the “Party of the People's Alternative"? It is a fact that in order to become the vanguard, in order to achieve the vanguard of the class, one first have to dare to

build it up. Or is this not the case? Neither are there masses without classes, nor a class from which no political vanguard rises. That is Leninism, not Luxembourgism and not anarchism in the question of organization. Considering the four fundamental contradictions within our semifeudal and neocolonial society in Panama - the contradiction between working class and capitalist class, the contradiction between nation and imperialism, mainly and actually US imperialism, the contradiction between peasantry and feudal big landowner class, the contradiction between the working population and the comprador bourgeoisie - our party points out that the way for the socialist revolution is still very long. Maybe this situation will stretch out over several decades or a century until the objective and subjective conditions are ripe in order to carry out the socialist revolution in the country. Therefore we expect a long continuous period during which we must unite the revolutionary forces. In this situation we propagate the priority of a united front of the workers and all working people for full political freedom, for the national freedom of our homeland and the social freedom of all those being exploited and suppressed. Finally we urgently call for joining the different struggle fronts of the masses to a united revolutionary peoples movement on a massive scale to achieve democracy, that is a Democratic Republic, which is carried and surrounded by organizations of the people. The existence, the political attitude and practice of every revolutionary party is shaped by its being able to identify the class that is the mainstay of the political and social change inevitably and by supporting it in the implementation of its political line. And the proletariat has proved to be this class. The Marxism-Leninism determined that and this was confirmed by more than two centuries of proletarian struggle, revolution and construction of socialism. Contrary to the theses that bourgeois class theoreticians proclaim and false Marxists repeat, who deny this. The predominant way of thinking is exactly the negation of the existence of classes per se and the existence of the working class in particular. We Marxist Leninists did not invent the theory about the social classes, but the bourgeoisie itself, when


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it was a revolutionary class and was not afraid of facing up to the facts of social reality. From Marx until today we claim again and again: “1) that the existence of classes is accompanied only by a certain historical stage of the evolution of the production; 2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat ; 3) that this dictatorship inherently is nothing else than the transition for the abolition of all classes and to a classless society... (own translation). But what do the facts and figures show us about this increasing disappearance of the working class? Let's take the statistics which the audit division of the Republic provided us, although we have to consider that Panama is not a sufficient example of the confirmation or non-confirmation of the evolution of the working class. According to this source 1,814,927 persons (63,32 percent) are counted to the economically active population and 728,229 (25,04 percent) to the non-economically active in 2000. Of the first mentioned, 942,024 were employed (51,9 percent) and 144,574 (7,96 percent) unemployed. The economically active population climbed within 37 years from 631,627 (1963) to 1,814,827 (2000). In other words its numbers tripled. Within the same period, the number of the employees increased from 345,375 to 942,024. So it also tripled. The number of unemployed persons equally increased from 1395 to 144,574. That means six times as many. According to this data the total of the workers strictly speaking was 336,362 and if we consider the workers in broader sense, there were 592,103. The reader can already recognize how much he can believe the bourgeois class theoreticians and their graduated footmen, who disguise themselves badly in a socialist mantel. The question of the classes is of highest importance. This means answering three basic questions: 1) Which class has the power? 2) Which class must be overthrown? 3) Which class is the one to seize the power. In answering these three key questions we will come closer to the question, “who is our friend and who is our enemy?" In turn, this gives us information about the question of the political alliances, the limitation or the greater extent of the circle of our allies. The party must distinguish two kinds of the activity when it draws up the line of strategy and tactics, which must be developed together with the working class. On the one hand, the ideological struggle and, on the other hand, the two other forms of struggle, the economic and the political

one. In the former, the party has no cultural facilities at its disposal that it has not created itself. However, in the latter, the party must implement a flexible united front policy: The united front for the socialism, the united front for the well-being of the people, the united front for the people's democracy and the united front for national independence. Thus, we have defined the principal contradiction and our strategic objectives. In doing so, we use the principle “one against ten and ten against one" as a strategic method of struggle. Consequently, we will have to define the principles which guide our work together with the masses: FIRSTLY, to assess the entire situation and to ddiirreecctt the main thrust currently against the direct main enemy. SECONDLY, not to attack on several flanks and not to antagonize several enemies at the same time, THIRDLY, to gain the maximum number of friends. We FOURTHLY have to think for the majority when we define our politics and tactics, FIFTHLY we as Marxists represent a minority of the population. We must always know where we ssttaanndd and work in an adequate way. The revolution is inevitable. However, it will not arise by itself; we must help it to see the light of day. Three irreplaceable instruments are necessary for it to be born: A revolutionary class which is led by a revolutionary party, a revolutionary united front and a revolutionary army. It is clear that the party plays a decisive role in these three arms of the revolution, in order to carry it out with determination and not deviate from the path. End the repression against the students! In face of the collapse of the educational system and in order to express their aversion to the arrival of the lackeys [monita] of the Nazi criminal Bush, the students of the National University and the University for Art and Trades staged a street blockade. The student action was obviously legal and justified, because the government had not yet been able ban the social and political protest by a change of the political constitution. Nevertheless, the Torrijo government and his rabid Dobermann terrier Mirones conducted a brutal police repression against the students. The public insecurity... no, the public security forces implemented their complete combat inventory: beatings, rubber projectiles and the infiltration of agents provocateur into the line of the students, to drive them apart and discredit them. Arrests occurred, the closing of two schools and the demand that the parents should pay for supposedly incurred damages.


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In face of such pretension on the part of the former G-2-agents in the office of the minister for national brutalization, the parents refused to pay and threatened to go on the streets and to protest against the illegal actions of the perfidious Cañizales. Shameful and abhorrent The actions of fascist mobs in the university Our editorial board received a letter with strong accusations concerning physical attacks against students, actual punitive expeditions, as we know them from the PRD (Revolutionary Democratic Party) , merely because the students tried to develop ties to the masses of the people, the peasants and indigenous people and to avoid the bureaucratic controls of the henchmen in robes, who are in high offices in the university. We publish the following excerpts: ”THE U.E.R. INFORMS AND CHARGES: On Thursday, 14 June, between 10:30 and 11:30 in the morning, 30 evildoers disguised as students and being protected and supported in their cowardice by the University People’s Block and its pseudo-leaders Boris Sánchez (University Council for Humanistic Studies), Carlos Moya and René Crespo (both functionaries of the University of Panama) physically attacked the comrades and students of sociology Ricardo Cóniga and Martín Castillo in the hall of the Humanistic Department in an utmost vile and brutal way. After they disparaged and provoked our comrades with abusive remarks, these villains began to attack them in numbers with objects, fists and kicks, so endangering their lives and their physical safety. This block of thugs was composed of student of the Humanistic Department of the Regional Center of Chorrera and the Regional Center of Darién, which is led by Migdonio Murillo and where the henchmen Raúl Crespo and Carlos Moya do what they please. Using public funds out of the university budget meant for the Regional Center in Darién, they planned and organized this gangster action against our organization. We know that this attack was launched by OBSCURE AND ANTI-PEOPLE INTERESTS OF VARIOUS GROUPS who were smuggled into the university for fear of the dynamics and the actions which our organization initiated in and outside of the university.” After our comrade students named the numerous activities which they developed together with broad parts of the people and so were the object of the anger of the political student organizations, the University of Panama, the P.R.D. and the National Security Service, these

comrades, who are justifiably proud of their work for which they had been attacked, stated: ”WE WILL GIVE THE UNIVERSITIES AND THE STUDENTS BACK THE ROLE THAT WE ONCE HAD IN HISTORY AND THAT WE WILL FULFILL: TO BE THE CRITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE NATION!” Because of all of this the accusers write: ”We demand: • that the principal and the academic council

immediately initiate a thorough investigation and find the persons who are responsible.

• That it will be found out why these functionaries of the University of Panama perform such tasks in their working time, namely instructing and promoting gangs within our school.

• That the Principal for Student Affairs, the deacon of the Humanistic Department, the director of the Regional Center of Chorrera, the director of the School for Sociology and the Regional Center of Darién fulfill their duty and give a complete report on the occurrences on Thursday, the 14th, on how it could be that students of the Humanistic Department, as well as the Regional University Centers of Darién and Chorrera could play a leading role in the crimes of vandalism on the center campus.

• That the pseudo-leader Boris Sánchez and other evildoers disguised as students who took part in the attack be dispelled from the university; that the functionaries Raúl Crespo and Carlos Moya, who led this cowardly attack during their working time be dismissed and punished. That also goes for any other student, administrative employee or teacher who participated in these occurrences intellectually or physically. That means and funds of the leaders of the student association at the Institute of Sociology, which had been used for personal interests for more than two years, be audited. In this matter we demand of the honest groupings and organizations of students, teachers and administrative employees, as well as of the entire independent student family, that these show their solidarity with our organization. These occurrences must serve to end the CORRUPTION, the IMPUNITY and the IMPUDENCE which have developed at the University of Panama. OUR UNIVERSITY IS NOONE’S WAR SPOILS!” So the end of the statement issued by the students.


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We will broaden our identification and solidarity with the Revolutionary Student Association (Unidad Estudiantil Revolucionaria). We will also protest with determination against the machinations and the attempts of the PRD and its government to silence the social protest by using the methods of fascist terror squads. Workers’ Struggles SUNTRACS begins a nationwide strike Following month long massive actions aimed at forcing the labor administration offices to assume their responsibility for the growing number of ”workplace accidents”, the trade union of the construction workers decided to go on a nationwide strike for their central demand ”Accident Prevention or Death”. They so fulfil the explicit mandate of the general meeting of April 26th. This had been a reaction to the massive deterioration of working conditions in industry resulting from the reckless striving for profits of the entrepreneurs, who do not care in the least about the workers’ lives. This was the cause of killings of dozens of workers that went unpunished or of their becoming cripples. These had terrible results: mothers became widows, boys and girl became orphans and proletarian families were left back without any help. As the trade unionists explain, this amounts to manslaughter, when ”the entrepreneurs force the workers to do heavy labor which endangers their health, the physical safety and their lives, even going so far as to death on the grounds of carelessness, disregard of the laws or of neglecting to distribute the necessary tools to ensure job safety.” It is also necessary that the entrepreneurs as those responsible be severely punished (with prison or compensation payments), as well as the officials of the labor administration who guilty of neglect. In order to end or to mitigate this criminal behavior of the entrepreneurs, as well as the conspiracy of the Torrijos government, the construction workers demand that the former ratify the IAO-Treaty 167 for Health and Security on Construction Sites of 1988 and that they adopt the Rules for Health and Security in the Construction Trade, which were worked out in a commission formed by a number of institutions. They should also revise the Law on the Program for On the Job Risks on the basis of the proposal made by Frenadesco, known as the Law of Life. We also demand laws (code for health and job security in the

construction trade) which take the above instruments into consideration as well as the stipulations already contained in the labor law, the constitution of social security funds, in criminal law, in the laws on health, the decrees of the Mayor of the city of Panama (on protective clothing, noise protection, etc.). In addition the leading board of the social security fund should adopt the rules for security and safety in the construction trade. In order to push through their demands the trade union has developed a number of mass actions (pickets, street blockades, occupation of construction sites, etc.). For example, more than 160 construction sites in the entire country with more than 10,000 workers participating were brought to a standstill. That was directed against the extremely slow pace of the administrative offices and the sabotage of the labor ministry. With the help of this declaration in which we declare our class-conscious and militant solidarity, we also want to call upon the entire trade union movement in Panama, upon all people’s, student and democratic organizations to express their support for this justified strike. Their struggle is our struggle. The city administration wants to drive out the street vendors There is much concern among the street vendors about the tricks of the oligarchic Juan Carlos Navarro, mayor of the city. Even if he disguises his genuine underhanded intentions with regard to the trade unions, you should not forget that it was he who demanded parallel trade unions, who ordered the street vendors to go into non-existent ”rooms” for which he is demanding one Balboa per day, after a municipal ordinance forced them to pay five Balboas per month. Are we workers supposed to pay for your candidature to the presidency? You scoundrel! And to top that, the mayor is paying for the trade union office with municipal funds in order to maintain control over one of the general secretaries. What other dirty tricks are you thinking out against our interests? None other than to drive us away from our simple vending stalls in Calidonia, the pedestrian zone, Salsipuedes and other places in the city center. Articles from ”El mundo del trabajo” (Labor world), Volume 1, No. 5, June 2007. #


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Country Report Peru Declaration of the Political Commission,

Submitted in shortened form as a Country Report to the 9th International Conference

The Political Situation and Our Tasks 1. After Lourdes Flores Nano, the man upon whom US-imperialism and its allies in the country (the comprador-bourgeoisie and the other right-wing reactionaries) had put their hopes, had suffered a defeat, they had no other choice than to play their second card, Alan Garcia, the candidate of the APRA-Party, in order to prevent the victory of the progressive and nationalistic forces at all costs. With the mass media at their service and by implementing a ruthless campaign of ideological and economic terrorism, including deceit and demagogy, they succeeded in having Alan Garcia become a candidate. So APRA, the old party which Victor Raul Haya, the big chameleon of Peruvian policy, founded, wrote another page in its long history of capitulation and indulgence, as it had done before with Benavides, Odria, Prado and Belaunde, all former leaders of the Peruvian oligarchy. The fright and fear, which flowed through the middle classes like oil, the ambivalent speech of O.Humala, who plumply tried to ”show respect for property and democracy”; the naive interference of C. Chavez (to put it mildly), which was used skilfully by the right-wing and A. Garcia to stir up animosity against foreigners slumbering in the middle class; the presence of dubious persons on the electoral list, as well as on the list of candidates for congress, who were ”repeaters” with dubious backgrounds; sectarianism promoted by revisionism and splits within the democratic and left forces; the plump and lunatic declarations of family members, and of course, the weakness of the revolutionary Marxist Leninist organisations themselves are doubtlessly the reason for the electoral defeat of O.Humala and the frustration of the hopes that many sectors of the people had placed on

him. A real and genuine super-cooperation of the control of power and the government has been established. The right-wing and the corrupt head of the APRA under Alan Garcia’s leadership with Fujimorism as an ally, the PPC, the leadership of the ultra-right wing like Rey Rey and Cipriani, parts of "fascistic militarism", whose most prominent representative is Giampietri, the first vice-president, and the big groups of economic power, who are unconditional partners of imperialism - they all have built an anti-national block, prepared to uphold the neoliberal program, the famous " stabilization treaties ", which favor the imperialist monopolies, which exploit our natural resources, without touching their fabulous extra-profits in the least. These strategic enterprises (energy, communication, finances, etc.), which were sold out by Fujimori for a miserable price, are not being returned to state-ownership. They pay the incredible interest on schedule, regardless of what may happen, even if the workers die of starvation. They concluded the free trade agreement TLC, even if the little industry still existing is ruthlessly privatized, agriculture and the farmers are going bankrupt and Peru is being transformed into a new North American colony. They push through impunity for corruption and genocide and, because they are directly involved, they deviously manipulate the justified opposition of the people against brutality and murders committed against minors, and even the opposition of the masses against the irrational fraud and state terrorism, which they have been subject to for years. They also want to install the death penalty. Their goal is to get the country out of the responsibility towards the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and to so avoid their being tried and sentenced. The neoliberal continuity, obedience, lies and demagogy constitute the true nature of the current government headed by Alan Garcia. A


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government that is formally in accordance with the constitution, but where you can increasingly sense the growth of authoritarianism with fascist tendencies. The neocolonization of Peru and the impoverishment of the people are increasing. As a fundamental result of the economic development in which the international price of raw materials has risen to a historic level (for instance the copper price has risen from 0.83 US$ per pound in 2003 to 3.60 US$ in 2006, gasoline from 15 US$ per barrel 2002 to 70 US$ in 2006), Peru has experienced economic growth of more than 5.5% annually in the last five years, and in the last 6 years the economy has grown by 36%. However, the features of poverty have not changed. More than 53% of the population live in poverty, which means on less than 2$ per day, and more than 25% live in extreme poverty on less than 1 $ per day. According to the INEI (national institute for statistics and informatics), 2,700,000 children are working, most of them in jobs like collecting garbage, in the coal and stone mines, washing cars, in construction, as waiters, shoe shiners etc.. They have no access to the health and education system nor to recreation, to which they actually have the right . The lack of jobs is another menace for the people. More than 12 % of the working population are in absolute and open unemployment and many more are out of public notice. Millions are underemployed with an income of less than 400 soles per month. Those who have work (the majority only temporary) have no social security, insecure wages (400 to less than 1000 soles per month according to the statistical information of MT(Mesa Tripartita) ), are working until exhaustion and without overtime pay. To get a more concrete picture of this situation, it is necessary to be familiar with the big firms, like Barric, Backus, Telefonica, etc. where almost 80% of the workers are not union organised. Their relation to the firm is through contractor firms and other forms of outsourcing. The factories are using all forms of coercion; with threats of dismissal and bribery they try to uphold this situation in order to have more favorable conditions for exploiting the

workers. In contrast to that, the big factories are making fabulous profits, especially those which are owned by imperialist capital and protected and helped by the governments, including the present one. For example, in the year 2005, the great majority of the 100 largest firms had a transnational income of more than 31 billion US$. The mining industry for example, which makes up for more than 50% of all exports, made profits of more than 850 Mio. US $ in the second quarter of 2006 and will make an estimated 3 billion US$ in profits by the end of the year. The sum of 500 soles per year, which Garcia is begging for on his knees from the big firms, is less than 5% of their profits. He now claims this to be a big success, so turning it into dreadful demagogy. Actually only pittance. Our task is to mobilise the people to develop a strong opposition in all fields and with all forms and to struggle against the continuing neoliberal program and the authoritarian line of the regime, for the defense of its justified economic and political rights, for better living and working conditions, for the defense of sovereignty, territorial integrity and national dignity. We have to strive to mobilize the various revolutionary, democratic, patriotic and progressive forces and fields, to unite and fight together in all fields and to so defeat the dark intentions of imperialism and its partners and allies, the reactionary bourgeoisie and the government of Alan Garcia, which is in their service. The coordination and the treaty of unity in action, which we have achieved with some organisations with nationalistic and indigenous tendency, is a first step. It is only a small one, but it has to be strengthened with utmost initiative. This is our concrete political orientation. For this we propose the following platform of struggle and unity to the workers and the people:

• End neoliberal economic policy. • Announce a break in foreign debt

payments and demand their annulment • Annul those treaties for handing over

and "selling" public enterprises, the


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sources of income and the raw materials, which have been negotiated with the monopolies and the transnational firms.

• Fundamental tax-reform with the direct taxes as a basis. Those who earn the most, pay the most. Abolition of the tax privileges granted to the big monopoly enterprises.

• No to ALCA or TLC • Directive on raising wages or income

for the active workers, as well as for those without work and retired people. Rehiring of the dismissed workers. Effective abolition of the system of contract labor and all other forms of outsourcing.

• Taking urgent measures in the credit sphere and the system of taxes with the aim of supporting the national industry, the middle-, small and micro-enterprises and of giving incentives to agriculture. Distribution of land and abolition of debts for the small and middle farmers and an immediate stop of selling land estates.

• Defense of the legal cultivation of coca and its traditional use by peasants and ethnic groups. Industrialisation of processing coca.

• Introduction of a universal, obligatory, mutually supportive system of social insurance.

• Complete acknowledgment of the political, economical and cultural rights of the nationalities and ethnic groups living in Peru.

• Defense of the environment and the ecological balance. Compensation by the transnational firms to the people and communities for the environmental damage of their land, their waters and the environment.

• Immediate acknowledgment of all democratic, political and union rights of the workers and the people.

• Reinstallment of an educational system which is free of charge for all stages and qualifications, development of educational personnel and educational policy. Giving back the autonomy and the democratic leadership of the

Peruvian university. Free entrance to the universities.

• Freedom for all political prisoners and social fighters.

• Material and moral compensation for the victims of the "dirty war"

• Total destruction of the criminal and Mafioso organization introduced by the dictatorship and upheld by Toledo, exemplary punishment of the leaders and puppet figures of this organisation, starting with the most responsible, the ex-dictator and traitor to the country A. Fujimori.

• Justice in service of the people. Comprehensive reform of the power of the judiciary, by doing away with corruption under control by the organised population.

• Promotion of the reorganization and democratization of the armed forces, with the aim of transforming them into a useful instrument for the economic and social development in the country and for defending national sovereignty and territorial integrity.

• Effective and real decentralisation. Complete economic, political and administrative autonomy of the regions.

• Maintaining an international policy of Bolivarian unity, with constant and determined respect for the principle of independence and self-determination of the countries and peoples and the rejection of every kind of foreign intervention.

• Uncompromising defense of national and territorial sovereignty. Condemnation and rejection of all attempts to violate it. No to a ”marine treaty”.

• Convening a constitutional assembly aimed at setting up a new, democratic, patriotic, decentralized and socially just assembly.

The political orientation which we propose are concrete tactics to achieve the broadest accumulation of political and social forces, to unmask the reactionary and treacherous character of the regime of Alan, to further develop the political awareness of the masses


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and to create the best possible objective and subjective conditions and to lead the people to a peoples’ rebellion within a short or medium-term period of time. This will prepare the way for a democratic peoples` government and to abolish the neoliberal program with its consequences and so to put an end to the period marked by neoliberal colonialism, this vileness of imperialism, introduced by Alberto Fujimori and shamelessly continued by Painagua, Toledo and now upheld by the APRA regime. In this way, a real turn in the political history of the country will be reached. 2. The weakness of the revolutionary Marxist-Leninist forces is still the biggest problem and the biggest deficiency that the workers’ and peoples’ movement faces in order to advance and gain victory. Because it must be our first and most important task to overcome this situation, it is not enough to establish how far we have advanced up till now. These limited results have a lot to do with the lack of understanding of the vital importance of the task, its merely formal and not concrete acknowledgement, with economism, small-minded local patriotism, spontaneity and other mistakes that threw us backwards. We must improve ourselves and work with honesty, openness and creativity to stand the challenge and rebuild a party that is armed with the Marxist-Leninist ideology and theory and Mao-Tzedong Thought; a party, true to the ideas of its founder José Carlos Mariátegui, a party which takes an irreconcilable stand against reformism, revisionism, dogmatism, adventurism and all other forms of opportunism. 3. Struggle and work to rebuild a united workers’ and trade union movement with a class trade union line. It must be democratized and free of bureaucracy, manipulation and exploitation as practiced by old crusty revisionists and bureaucratic and aristocratic reformists. The reorientation along the line of class struggle of CGTP and SUTEP and other important trade union organisations of the workers is a key issue in this direction.

4. In the same way, we must work to rebuild the peoples’ movement. Its unity and organizations, mainly the defense fronts, the organisations in neighborhoods and communities, the peasant-guards (rondas campesinas), who take a firm stand against revisionism, which tries to contain them bureaucratically and so subordinate them to collaboration and appeasement. 5. Special attention must be paid to building and organizing the peoples’ meetings with the clear perspective, that these are the nucleus of peoples’ power and must therefore be independent, able to make decisions and control. 6. Democratic and united organisations for the self-defense of the people must be built up, which are called upon to play an important role in the defense of the peoples’ democratic rights, the integrity of its organisations and leaders, in the cities as well as in the countryside. 7. Agitation and propaganda work has to be intensified, most importantly, the regular and permanent publishing of the party newspaper "Bandera Proletaria". All necessary political, organizational and material measures have to be taken for this. 8. Intensify the party’s Marxist-Leninist educational work, aiming especially at building up a larger number of groups, especially with young people, who will improve the quality of the working and leading bodies at all levels. 9. Continue persistently with the preparations to conduct the party congress on schedule.

Political Commission Lima, March 2007

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Country Report Turkey Bolshevik Party (North Kurdistan-Turkey)

Turkey is a capitalist country, dependent on imperialism, with feudal remnants especially in the superstructure. It is listed in the documents of the World Bank under the category ”countries with medium income (upper category)”. The ”dependent capitalism” does not hinder the Turkish private capitalistic big bourgeoisie from possessing rather large amounts of equity capital and also investing abroad. Thus it is an important regional power in the Middle East, has been keeping North Kurdistan and North Cyprus occupied and has expansionist intentions. Currently this quality is manifested in the form of threats and actual preparations for a military intervention in South Kurdistan. Some facts concerning the structure of Turkey: Population At the end of 2006 nearly 73 million people were living in Turkey. (*1) Turkey is a multinational state. The prevailing nation – Turks – is the majority (about 70 %); the Kurds are the second biggest group of the population with about 20 %. (*2) They mainly settle in the area of Kurdistan, which remained in the borders of the ”Republic of Turkey” with the imperialist re”organization” of the borders in the Middle East after the First World War: North Kurdistan. In addition, national minorities live in Turkey: Armenians, Greeks, Jews, Arabs, Circassians, Lazens, etc. Armenians and Greeks are also recognized as ”Christian minorities” in the treaty of Lausanne (1923). (Only a few of them are still living in Turkey. 1.3 million people of the Armenian nation were killed by the Turkish ruling classes in the first genocide of the 20th century. Over a million Anatolian and Thracian Greeks were expelled to Greece in an ”exchange of population” according to the treaty of Lausanne, while nearly one million Turks from Greece were moved to Turkey.) The other – mainly Muslim – nationalities do not exist at all according to the official Turkish reading. The Turkish ruling classes deny any national suppression, as everybody is said to have full civil rights regardless of his or her nationality. Everybody in Turkey who does not belong to the Armenian or Greek minority is a ”Turk”. Who does not accept this and defines his or her national identity differently is labeled as ”separatist” and is persecuted. National suppression of non-Turkish nationalities is a characteristic of the Republic of Turkey since its founding. Religion The majority of the population is Muslim (99 %), mainly Sunnite. (*3)

Urban and rural population The majority of the population (beginning of 2007 – 62.83 %) is living in urban areas. Occupation according to sectors of the working population 20.03 % of the workforce are working in the processing industry – January 2007 – 5 % in the building trade, 49.2 % in the service sector, 25.5 % in the agricultural sector. The share of agriculture is 10.3 %, industry 25.4 %, building trade 4.4 %, services 59.9 % of the GNP. While the workforce in the agricultural sector and the share of the agricultural sector of the GNP/GDP is continuously decreasing, the figures for the other sectors are increasing. The economy is also organized in a capitalistic way in the agricultural sector. The still existing rests of feudal conditions of ownership especially in North Kurdistan are nearly of no importance for the economy as a whole. Conditions of ownership of the land The main form of land ownership in Turkey/North Kurdistan today is small and middle property. Most of the agriculture businesses in Turkey are small farms mainly on the basis of ”family work” and in addition only employ few wageworkers. ”Serfdom” practically does not exist any more. The feudal remnants are more obvious in the superstructure than in the economy They are manifested in the influence of religion (Islam), which still penetrates everything, in various forms of non-economic relationships of dependence of former serfs on their former landlord, in the partial continuation of some feudal traditions like feudal family and clan bonds, blood vengeance (even if not as a mass phenomenon), killing of wives by ”decision of the family council”, etc. Economy The gross domestic product (GDP) of Turkey came to 400.046 billion US dollars in 2006. In 2005 Turkey was number 20 on the worldwide GDP ranking list of the states. In the GDP ranking list of purchasing power parity (GDP in ppp) Turkey was number 18. In terms of the size of its economy, among the EU member states and accession candidates Turkey is the 8th largest power. In 2000/2001 Turkey saw one of its deepest crises of the last decades so that the development of the GDP was negative in this year – minus 8.7 %. Since the crisis of 2001, without exception there has been a relatively high balance of development.


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The average economic growth in the years 2002 – 2006 was 7.1 %. With this speed of growth, Turkey belonged to the countries in the EU developing fastest of all. This high growth rate also continued in 2006 with about 6 %, though it slowed down a little bit. That means the Turkish economy as a whole is a growing capitalist economy with all the peculiarities belonging to a capitalist economy. This was proved e.g. by the development of industrial production and by the export structure of Turkey. The exports of Turkey today no longer consist of raw materials and a few selected agricultural products, but mainly of industrial products. In 2005 Turkey had a total export volume of 73.414 billion US dollars. The total volume of the agricultural exports was 3.46 billion USD, i.e. only 4.71 % of the total export. Mining products accounted for 1.01 % (809 million USD). 93.64 % of all exported goods were goods of the processing industry. Capital goods with a value of 24.810 billion USD are of significant importance. In 2005 the textile business was again number one in exports with a total value of 25.460 billion USD. (*4) Cars and trucks (13 % of exports) and machines (10 % of exports) were among the exported goods as well. That means Turkey is no longer only an agricultural and raw material exporter, a ”low-wage” country and a big market for the imperialist powers, but also a power potentially developing into a serious competitor at least in some lines, one which one has to reckon with and cooperate with in jointly opening up new markets. So many ”joint ventures” are developing especially in light industry and the building industry in which the imperialist capital does good business together with its lackeys in Turkey. Turkey’s position in world production of some selected products We can see the result on the basis of Turkey’s current position in the world production of some selected industrial products: With 158,000 new apartments in 2005, Turkey was number 9 in the world in the housing construction sector. With 35.076 million tons Turkey is number 9 in cement production. In the production of synthetic fiber on cellulose and synthetic basis it is number 10. With 20.478 million tons in 2004 it is number 12 in steel production, with 12.463 million sets it is number 2 in the production of TV sets and number 12 in the production of household refrigerators. Dependent capitalism But we should know for sure that this development does not diminish Turkey’s dependency on imperialism, but strengthens it. Even if the Turkish big bourgeoisie today does not

act as the classic comprador, i.e. only as agent of the foreign capital, but has quite a bit of equity capital at its disposal (*5), makes foreign investments itself, etc., this development is secured at the expense of high foreign debts. Turkey’s economy is an economy dependent on imperialism. It is a state deeply in debt. The foreign debts amounted to 198.261 billion US dollars in September 2006. International organizations of capital like the IMF and the World Bank, for which the most important thing is that the so-called ”debt service” passes off smoothly, are dictating Turkey’s ”economic programs”. The ruling Turkish big bourgeoisie offers its service to the imperialists – against good money of course – as willing helper to open up the markets in the Middle East and in the peripheral countries of the former Soviet Union with mainly Islamic Turkic peoples. US imperialism still is the predominant imperialist power in Turkey. But it has a serious competitor in German imperialism, which has been Turkey’s biggest ”trading partner” since the 1970s and also outstripped the USA in direct investments – except in the military industry. Also French, English, Swedish imperialism are strongly engaged in Turkey. There is a struggle for dominance in Turkey between the USA and the EU, i.e. of course mainly Germany and France. State sector The economy of the ”state sector” still is of significant importance in Turkey/North Kurdistan. This importance, which was decisive until the 1980s, is more and more driven back by privatization. In Turkey the special thing about this is that the higher bureaucrats working in this sector define themselves as the true ”masters of the state” and behave accordingly. That includes not only the higher leaders of the state-owned concerns in industry, but also the leaders of the state-owned service enterprises. Résumé We think that these facts speak for themselves and show clearly that Turkey is a capitalist country dependent on imperialism. To estimate Turkey of today as a semi-feudal country, as still just a few Maoist organizations do, ignores the realities of Turkey. In our opinion, in such a country it is out of place to propagate the people’s war, mainly as a peasant revolution on the basis of the agrarian revolution, as the only way to revolution. There was and there is no peasant movement in Turkey which has been developing on the basis of agrarian revolutionary demands – above all for land. Such a movement also will not develop on the economic basis of Turkey.


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The dissolving process of fascism Politically Turkey still is a fascist state. That means the rule of the Turkish bourgeoisie is mainly based on open systematic terror – to be precise, since the foundation of the Republic of Turkey in 1923. The Kemalists, who had led the liberation war of the peoples of Turkey against the imperialist occupants and above all against the willing helpers like the Greek rulers, founded a new bourgeois Turkish state on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire after the military victory in the liberation war. In this state any opposition was suppressed with fascist means in the name of defending the Turkish/Kemalistic revolution. A one-party/one-man dictatorship was established. The organized communist movement in Turkey nearly always mistakenly overstressed the positive aspects of the Kemalistic rule and in the end acted as supporter of the Kemalistic revolution, which did not prevent the Kemalistic attacks aimed at smashing the CP. Only Ibrahim Kaypakkaya, the founder of the TKP/ML – our forerunner organization – analyzed the true character of the Kemalistic dictatorship as fascist in 1972 and opened the way to develop a communist movement as an independent political force. Though a multiparty democracy was formally introduced after the Second World War, the power of government always remained in the hands of the Kemalistic bureaucratic bourgeoisie with the army as the center. And at any time when the state bureaucracy saw its power in danger the army organized a putsch (as on 27 May 1960 and 12 September 1980) or threatened with a putsch to enforce its favored government (as on 12 March 1971 and 28 February 1997). In recent years, however, we have seen and we see a development which our party called the ”dissolving process of fascism” at its 8th congress at the beginning of 2006. Admittedly we are not as far as the Turkish state having changed its fascist character. But today it is a fact that various allegedly unchangeable basic policies, ”red lines” of the state, are called into question even by a part of the big bourgeoisie. We saw this e.g. in the ”Cyprus question”. The private capitalistic part of the big bourgeoisie openly demanded a policy change in the Cyprus question, which again and again has been set before the Turkish bourgeoisie in foreign relations since decades. This policy change, providing for the adoption of the ”Annan plan”, was carried out in the end by the AKP government in spite of all ”betrayal of the fatherland”, ”sell-out of Cyprus”, Turkish-racist campaigns of the Kemalistic bureaucratic bourgeoisie. Also in the question of the genocide on the Armenians the decades-old hush-up policy had to be thrown overboard. The Turkish state was forced to discuss this question by its own institutions. In this context it is very important that hundreds of

thousands of people were in the streets everywhere in Turkey after the fascist-Turkish racist assassination of the Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in January 2007 with the slogans ”We are all Hrant Dinks”, ”We are all Armenians”. This was the first time in the history of Turkey/North Kurdistan that people of all nationalities, classes and strata of Turkey openly expressed their annoyance about the ignorant racist policy of the state in mass actions. The ”unchangeable” ideology of the state, Kemalism, which is even established in the constitution as the ”principles of Atatürk”, today is called into question not only by real communists but also by wide sections. The state radio/TV institution – TRT – finds itself forced to offer programs in a language the existence of which has been denied by the Turkish state until recently, in Kurdish – even if it is temporally very limited. All of that and even more are signs that we see as a democratization in a bourgeois sense, in other words ”a dissolving process of fascism”. The ”adaptation process to the EU standards” during the EU membership efforts of Turkey is of significant importance in this process in Turkey – the private capitalistic big bourgeoisie of Turkey absolutely wants to be a member of the EU. Dozens of statutes, decrees, regulations, etc., signify on the legal level that Turkey is on the way from fascism to a reactionary democracy. In this context our 8th congress stated the following: ”Taking the bills being passed during the adaptation process to the EU standards as a basis, currently there is no fundamental difference between Turkey and the ‘bourgeois-democratic countries’ of the EU. The big bureaucratic state bourgeoisie still ruling the state apparatus, however, is fighting against the practical implementation of these bills, is trying to prevent practicing them with all means. There are lots of examples in the judiciary and in the relationships between the government and the army, etc. This is the reason why we still cannot currently judge Turkey as a bourgeois-democratic state even if, according to the statutes, there are no fundamental differences to the bourgeois-democratic countries. Open terror and legal arbitrariness still are the main ruling methods even if they are more and more driven back. For this reason it is right to define Turkey still as a fascist state where fascism is in a dissolving process.” Character and way of the revolution In its first stage the revolution in Turkey/North Kurdistan will be an anti-imperialist, anti-fascist, new-democratic one. This revolution will have a socialist perspective and will be incessantly continued under the dictatorship of the workers and peasants. Within the current socioeconomic structure of Turkey we have to assume that there


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will be no long period of transition from the new-democratic to the socialist revolution and that a number of socialist measures will be possible also in the new-democratic stage of the revolution. The reasons for a new-democratic stage are not the existence of a ”semi-feudal structure” or decisive anti-feudal issues in the economy. The necessity for it is in the existence of anti-imperialist tasks, tasks in the national issue, anti-fascist tasks and above all a missing tradition and consciousness of democracy, let alone of socialism, among the toiling masses. Concerning the way of the revolution in Turkey it will not take the line of people’s war (peasant revolution, encirclement of the cities from the villages, etc.). It will rather take the Russian than the Chinese line, but of course without copying it. Some present political developments At the moment there is a bitter struggle among the ruling classes in Turkey. There are two opposite camps in this struggle. On one side are the defenders of the status quo of the now 84-year-old Kemalistic-fascist state: the Kemalistic bureaucratic bourgeoisie, which holds the state apparatus in its hands with the fascist army in the center. Politically, nearly all parties of the ruling classes are on this side, except the AKP in the government. The support of this wing by the population is more and more decreasing. They are behaving as defenders of – what they call – the ”laicist, democratic constitutional state” and the ”independence of Turkey”. Which is a fraud in all points. On the other side there is the present governing party calling itself a ”conservative-democratic” party. This party admittedly has an impressive majority in parliament (with a first-past-the-post electoral system), however it is afraid of a direct confrontation with the state bureaucracy, with those really in power in the country. It tries to creep to power with very careful steps. This party had split off from the radical-Islamic party, which was forbidden several times. It tries to get recognized as a ”moderate Islamic democratic reform party” by the imperialists and the Turkish big bourgeoisie. During its nearly five years in power this attempt was quite successful. It seems that imperialist powers from the USA to the EU along with organizations of the private-capitalist big bourgeoisie in Turkey (like TÜSIAD and TISK and others) have accepted the AKP as a model of a ”moderate Islamic Western-oriented” party. It is a fact indeed that today no imperialist power seems

to be ready to support a military putsch against the ”Islamic, anti-laicist” AKP government. The year 2007 is very important in the power struggle of these two wings. For there are two important elections which could be of significant importance for the power struggle. First is the election of the state president. In this first election, which has to be finished by 15 May, it seems that the present foreign minister, one of the cofounders of the AKP and a very intimate friend and comrade in the struggle of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Abdullah Gül, will be elected state president with the votes of the AKP. He was nominated as candidate by his party, which has a great majority in parliament. If so, the AKP would have seized another very important bastion of the Kemalistic state in the power struggle. The capture of the state president’s office by the AKP, which currently already represents a one-party government based on an impressive majority in parliament, would mean an enormous increase in power in its struggle to seize the whole power and would drive the Kemalistic rulers even more into a corner. To stop this development the Kemalistic rulers are trying everything. A prevention through an appeal to the constitutional court and early elections would be one possibility. The second election in 2007 is the general election for parliament. It has to take place by November of the year 2007 at the latest, but very probably will be earlier. In the months to come the power struggle will concentrate on these elections. If the AKP emerges victorious from these elections and wins a majority which makes it possible to form the government alone (without a coalition partner), this would be the worst-case scenario for the Kemalistic rulers. They will try everything to prevent such a development. The only thing they cannot do – so it seems today – is a direct military putsch and a direct seizing of power through the army as e.g. on 12 September 1980. This does not exclude threats of a putsch, which are partly being openly voiced. Neither the international mood nor the mood of the broad masses favor a direct military putsch. Under these conditions other options are on the agenda. For instance, by intensifying the war in North Kurdistan and through a military operation against South Kurdistan, armed clashes could be provoked in the interior, racism and chauvinism could be stimulated, the backward masses gathered around the fascist army under the banner of ”national interests”. In case elections are taking place in such a racialistically-nationalistically stirred up


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situation, the possibility to prevent any big AKP majority is greater than in ”normal” times. In the struggle for state power the issue of EU membership is of significant importance. The government intends to put through the ”democratization” and ”liberalization” demanded by the EU to drive back the Kemalists’ power while the Kemalists are more and more stepping out with an anti-EU and anti-imperialistic jargon. The negative attitude towards full membership of Turkey also among leading forces in the EU works to the advantage of those forces. It seems to be a struggle of democracy against national independence. Which is an illusion. Neither does one side stand for real democracy, nor does independence from imperialism really matter to the other side.Our position in the struggle among those in power is to make clear to the workers that it is like choosing between the plague and cholera. We have to lead our own struggle for democracy, independence, liberty and socialism against all parties of the ruling classes. We are too weak to benefit from the contradictions between them for our revolutionary struggle. The movement of the toiling masses The struggle of the working class Compared to the challenges the workers’ movement in Turkey is weakly developed. The grade of consciousness and organization is low. Not even 10 % of the workers are organized in unions. The current struggles are defensive struggles as a whole and their leadership usually is in the hands of the union bigwigs grown closer to the system. Thus the workers’ struggles mostly could be reduced to an appendage to a part of the ruling classes in their power struggle. We have seen this in the struggle against privatization. The union bigwigs titled the state capital as ”people’s property” and lead the struggle as a struggle for state capitalism. Or e.g. in the campaign against a bill presented by the government concerning a reform of local government. The Islamists wanted to weaken the central government and give more responsibilities to the local authorities to drive back the Kemalists’ power. The Kemalistic central state and its apologists were howling. And together and behind them the union bigwigs. The workers are called and organized for actions to defend the status quo. (*6) The peasants’ movement This movement as a movement with special peasant demands is weaker than the workers’ movement. In recent years the longest-lasting peasants’ movement was a struggle on the basis of environmental demands. It was about gold mining using cyanide in an area at the Aegean. An MNC wanted to buy the whole region to end the

peasants’ movement. The peasants did not allow themselves to be bought. This movement showed that environmental demands could be an important point to start developing mass movements in the future. The women’s movement in Turkey is developing slowly but continuously as a mass movement. Whereas a strong desire is developing among the working women to fight as an independent movement of women with its own demands, this desire is ignored and an independent movement of women is waved aside as feministic and divisive by most revolutionary organizations. So e.g. in recent years the proposal of various women’s organizations – also by us – to organize an independent women’s demonstration without men on 8 March in Istanbul is rejected by most of the revolutionary organizations. We think that it is a just desire of the women, that the independent organization of working women also in their own organizations does not weaken the class struggle of the working class, but will strengthen it by involving women in the direct struggle who would otherwise perhaps stay at home. The struggle of the learning and studying youth for their democratic and economic demands should not be underestimated in the mass movements in Turkey. In the late 1960s all future revolutionary and communist organizations developed from this movement. Today the level of this movement is not very high, but it has potential and has recovered from the deep depoliticization after 12 September 1980. The strongest mass movement of the working people in Turkey/North Kurdistan in the last 15 years has been without any doubt the Kurdish national movement. The bourgeois-nationalistic organization PKK and the armed struggle led by it were of decisive importance for its development. This organization has developed more and more openly on the basis of a reformist line. After being kidnapped and arrested its chairman Abdullah Öcalan now openly declared, under the control of the Turkish state, ”strengthening a unified Turkey” as the political aim. The PKK followed its chairman, who has himself celebrated as ”sun”. The PKK today is still determining its policy according to the guidelines of its chairman, who is a hostage in the hands of the Turkish state. The whole policy of the PKK is oriented to reconciliation with the Turkish state. The armed struggle is only of importance for the PKK to be recognized as opposite number in the negotiations. The Kurdish national movement today still is the biggest mass movement in Turkey. It is, however, now a reformist mass movement within the system, in agreement with the system. The reason of its sometimes radical appearance is because the Turkish fascist state is not ready to accept offers of the PKK. It wants the PKK to dissolve and surrender totally. It


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is an important task to win the still existing revolutionary potentials in this movement for the communist struggle. This will only be possible if the Bolshevik Party of North Kurdistan is able to embody itself as the real alternative among the masses in the struggle against the fascist Turkish state and against bourgeois nationalism and reformism. This is a difficult task, but without solving this task the unity of the working people of Turkey and North Kurdistan in the struggle against the common enemy will not be achieved. We must and will solve this task. The organized left movement Concerning the organized left movement left of social democracy, on the one hand legal leftists calling themselves socialist, partly communist, exist. None of these parties is really socialist. None of them really has a mass influence. Their real strength perhaps gets clearest in connection with elections. All together they would perhaps get 1 percent of the votes. Inevitably the revolutionary left is organized illegally in fascist Turkey. Of course, that does not mean that they do not work legally at all. They are publishing legal journals, are working in legal mass organizations like the trade unions, partly have their own ”mass” organizations, ”cultural” centers, people’s houses, etc., but they are illegal as a party. All these organizations call themselves socialist, communist, Marxist-Leninist or Maoist. There are three main movements: the former PLA supporters, Castroistic-centristic groups and Maoists. In our opinion a common characteristic of all of these left revolutionary organizations is that they make subjectivist assessments of the situation and grossly exaggerate. They exaggerate the spontaneous movement of the masses. They exaggerate their own situation and success. Studying the organs of revolutionary left organizations in Turkey/North Kurdistan one could come to the result that the revolution in Turkey/North Kurdistan is already on our doorstep. It will break out in the next days, months, etc. And the particular organization has strong links to the toiling masses and is leading their struggles. This image, however, has less to do with the reality but with the wish! To change the wish to reality, first of all it is necessary in our view to understand the reality as it is! An example for being out of touch with reality is the ”death-fast action” which was ended in January 2007 and lasted for nearly 6 years. 122 revolutionaries lost their lives, more than 600 revolutionaries suffered permanent damage to their health. In our view this was an action wrongly started and wrongly continued.

And us: BP T/NK has been existing as a party since 26 years. In these 26 years we have carved out our political profile and, starting with an expatriate organization, have developed into a working organization in Turkey/North Kurdistan. Main task: Bolshevist party building In our opinion the most important thing for the communists in any country is creating and building a Bolshevist party. This party has to be built in class struggle. This party must have grown roots among the working class. In our view any Bolshevist party building runs through two phases and has to do so. In the first phase of party building it is the main task to win the vanguard of the proletariat for communism. We are still in this first phase. We are working systematically to win the vanguard of the proletariat. This is why we are concentrating our forces on the struggle of the proletariat. We try to gain footholds in the factories and base our organizing work on our factory cells. We are working for a line of class struggle in the reactionary trade unions. Our whole practice shows us that this work is very difficult and protracted and will not meet with greater success in the short term. But Marxism-Leninism teaches us, and we know it from the experiences of the communist world movement and from our own experience, that this is the only proper way for the proletarian party and for the victory of the proletarian revolution. Two parties for two countries In regard to the organizational structure of our party we have pursued a new method taking the concrete analysis of the situation in Turkey/North Kurdistan and the Marxist-Leninist principles and experiences of the communist world movement, especially of the CPSU, as starting point. We have begun to build up two organizationally independent regional parties in Turkey and North Kurdistan which are joined together in a central party. At the end of our party building there will exist one BP Turkey in Turkey and one BP North Kurdistan in North Kurdistan. These parties are going to carry out their regional work totally independent of each other under their own responsibility. These parties are merged in the central party BP (NK/T). Due to the fact that the BP (NK/T) was founded as a central party we are now treading the reverse way. We try to develop two regional parties out of one central party. We see and experience the difficulties. But in the last years we also achieved a certain success and made important steps forward in overcoming these difficulties. ”New orientation” policy abroad Another issue is the future of our expatriate organization. We were


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forced by developments to start as a pure expatriate organization. We had rather large expatriate organizations in some Western European countries, mainly in the FRG. There was not only a foreign mission for international relations and some organizations for special tasks, but a whole party and sympathizer organization which made agitation and propaganda for the revolution in Turkey/North Kurdistan in the European countries among the workers from Turkey/North Kurdistan and tried to organize them for the revolution there. At our 5th congress (1994) we clearly analyzed that the workers from Turkey/North Kurdistan in the European countries whose life center is in these countries have become part of the working class of these countries and that they should organize in the communist parties of these countries. The future of our comrades and sympathizers abroad is in the communist organizations of the countries where they live if they do not return to NK/T or are sent there or are organized abroad for special tasks. We have been trying for years to put into practice this policy called ”new orientation”. We gained good experience and took concrete steps with it. Our 8th congress analyzed the situation and passed a resolution to intensify the steps taken on this issue and to complete the dissolving of the expatriate organizations in the particular communist organizations as quickly as possible. This resolution was implemented in summer 2006. Since July 2006 the expatriate organizations of the BP NK/T no longer exist. Comrades who can do a more effective work in Turkey or NK than abroad are working in Turkey and North Kurdistan. Comrades living abroad for various reasons have been called upon to work in organizations of the particular countries which we estimate as communist. Very few organized BP NK/T comrades temporarily entrusted with special duties have remained abroad. This development is of tremendous importance both for our own party history and for the history of the revolution of NK/T. 25. April 2007 *(1) According to the official figures of Mernis (central population registration system at the central directorship for population and nationality affairs) there were 74,530,939 citizens in Turkey at the end of 2006. The planning authority of the state (DPT) reported a population of 72.97 million people living in Turkey at the end of 2006. At the last census in 2000 there were 67,844,903. The rate of the increase in population was 1.83 % from 1990 to 2000, with the trend pointing down. In 2004 Turkey was the country with the 3rd largest population growth rate in Europe (1.52 %) after Spain (1.64 %) and Ireland (1.63 %). There are about 3 million emigrants from Turkey in various countries in the world as well, mainly in

Western Europe, more than 1.5 million of them in Germany. (*2) As there is no question about the national identity in the census there are no assured figures about the number of Kurds in Turkey. But there is a pretty broadly based population study made by a respected opinion research institute on behalf of the journal Milliyet, the results of which were published in March 2006. According to the study the number of those identifying themselves as Kurds or Zaza is projected to 15.6 % of the total population. (*3) The majority of the Muslim population are Sunnites. According to the aforesaid Milliyet study, 6.2 % of the population define themselves as ”Alevis”, which is an Anatolian version of Shiism. As the ”religious confession” was registered obligatorily at birth until 2004, it is difficult to estimate the number of atheist ”Muslims”. (*4) Of which: off-the-rack clothes/garments 13.708 billion USD; textiles and raw material 4.861 billion USD, leather and leather goods 1.017 billion USD. (*5) According to the 2007 Forbes report, 25 out of 946 ”dollar billionaires of the world” are from Turkey. Considering that these are the ”official” billionaires and that the economists estimate the extent of the so-called ”non-registered” black economy to be at least half of the entire economy, one can correctly estimate the capital possessed by the Turkish big capitalists. (*6) One of the most meaningful facts to see the real situation of the working class struggles are the strike statistics. For the recent 6 years the statistics show the following: Year Number of

strikes Number of strikers

Number of lost working days

2000 52 18705 368475

2001 35 9911 2860152002 27 4618 438852003 23 1535 1447722004 30 3557 931612005 28 2950 70311

Concerning the struggle of the working class there was no important change in the year 2006, either. Claiming on the basis of these strike statistics that the working class movement in Turkey is in an upswing or anything similar is missing the reality. #


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Contribution to International Conference The Economic and Political Development of the Imperialist World System

Bolshevik Party (North Kurdistan-Turkey) Economic trends When we talk about the economic development of the imperialist world system, we must first agree on the contents of the terms ‘crisis’”, ‘economic crisis’, ‘general crisis of the imperialist world system’, ‘cyclical crisis’, ‘crisis cycle’, ‘phases of a crisis cycle’, etc. Because in our opinion there is great confusion on this issue in the ranks of the revolutionaries and Marxist-Leninists. We stated our position how we believe these terms have been defined in Marxism-Leninism, what we should take as basis, in our contribution to the 8th ICMLPO entitled ”The Economic Crisis of Imperialism and Its Consequences”. We do not wish to repeat this here. Today we can only speak of a general crisis of capitalism in the sense that imperialism is moribund capitalism, that the only alternative to the unchecked development of the productive forces lies in smashing imperialism with the proletarian world revolution. But we cannot speak of the ”general crisis of capitalism” in the sense that the world is divided into two systems. Through the help of the revisionists, but partly also due to mistakes made by the communists, i.e., mistakes of ours, capitalism has managed to again create a situation similar to the one before the First World War, i.e., a situation in which imperialism held unlimited sway over the world, where no socialist and people’s democratic powers exist. Though this is certainly a temporary situation of defeat for the proletarian world revolution, it is still a fact. In our opinion it is an illusion to view relatively ”independent” economies which partly call themselves socialist, for example, China, the DPR Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, etc., and which are partly assessed, propagated and supported as socialist by various Leftist forces, as powers existing outside the imperialist world system. These assessments partly start from the existence of these countries or from the argument that there are struggles of the working class and the oppressed peoples against the imperialist world system, that Marxist-Leninist forces, though weak, fighting for socialism exist, and to that extent imperialism is in a general crisis – in our view this is not an analysis based on Marxism-Leninism. To pretend in the given situation that there has been no defeat will not get us any further. For this reason, when we speak of the crisis today we must study the cycles exactly

and not just refer to a ”constantly intensifying general crisis”, etc. In regard to the world economy it is important to know that the development of a handful of imperialist Great Powers continues to be the key to the development of the world economy. And among these imperialist powers the USA continues to play the main role. In 2005 the USA accounted for 33.6 percent of the real gross domestic product of the world, the share of the Europe of the 25 is 33.7 percent, more than that of the US for the first time; the share of the industrial countries as a whole, except China 4.8 percent, Russia 1.3 percent, is 84.7 percent. In the world economy, in the second half of 2000 the beginning of a new crisis cycle announced itself – despite continued strong growth in China and despite a recovery phase in Japan – manifesting itself mainly in the decline of production and economic growth in the USA and the EU region. Through the wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq, where the USA pumped enormous sums into the military industry on credit, the USA stimulated industrial output and consumption. This stopped the crisis from deepening and turned the trend around for the time being. While the USA succeeded in reversing the trend through wars, the weakest link in the world economy of the Great Powers was the EU, and there mainly Germany. The EU powers eagerly tried to overcome their low by intensifying the exploitation of the workers, by launching new economic recovery programs which gave big capital tax breaks, and through so-called austerity programs, which of course affect all working people. It seems as if this has succeeded for the time being. Between 2003 and 2006 world production grew at an annual average rate of 4.8 percent and thus appreciably faster than the medium-term rate of 3.3 percent observed up until then. In 2006 the expansion of the world economy continued. Real GDP even increased at the rate of 5 percent, a little faster than in 2005. That is, the trend reversal due to the US-led wars created a situation in which the normal course of the cycle was interrupted and an artificial ‘upswing phase’ was initiated. In the industrial countries as a whole, but mainly in the USA, this upswing lost momentum in the course of 2006. In 2006, for the first time since 2003 economic growth in the USA was less than 3 percent. On the other hand, with


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4.8 percent growth in 2006 the Japanese economy continued to boom. In 2006 the Euro area attained its highest growth rate since 2003 with an average growth of 3.6 percent. Whether the drop in the pace of growth in the USA means the end of the artificial upswing phase and the beginning of a new – or rather the continuation of the interrupted – cycle with a crisis remains to be seen in 2007. Factors opposing this: a) in Japan and in the EU the economy continues expanding; b) China and India continue to enjoy very high growth rates and the cheap products from these countries stimulate private consumption in the industrial countries, and – also through the pressure of low wages – inflation in the biggest imperialist countries is being kept within limits. Factors favoring this: the war both in Iraq and in Afghanistan is not going well for US imperialism; in the medium term this ‘lack of success’ will tell negatively not only on politics, but also on the economy as a whole. Important in this connection: Revolutionary work, education of the workers and working people for revolution and organizing, does not depend on whether an economic crisis currently exists. No matter what the economic situation is we can and must do revolutionary work. The crises clearly show us that imperialism is parasitic and decaying capitalism. Crises are inevitable accompaniments of capitalism. This being so, the struggles against the manifestations and effects of the crises, which are devastating for the working people, necessarily must be conducted as struggles to smash capitalism. Crisis combating programs which do not call in question the framework of the capitalist system – such as the programs of the leaders of the WSF– are eyewash. Political developments It is still a fact: * that US imperialism is aggressive and expansionist; * that it acts like a world policeman; * that it invades countries – as in Afghanistan and Iraq – and occupies them; * that it builds up further military bases everywhere – in the Middle East, in the Philippines, in Afghanistan, etc. – to translate its plans for world hegemony into action; * that it supports counterrevolutionary action against the peoples everywhere in the world – for instance, in Palestine, where the US is the principal supporter of Zionist state terrorism against the Palestinian people. US imperialism undoubtedly is the biggest imperialist power today, as regards economic power and also military and political power, and it

fights to gain sole world hegemony. The ‘New World Order’ declared by the Bush I Administration is nothing but the plan for a US empire, while at most the role of ‘junior partner’ is intended for the other imperialist Great Powers who are willing to go along with US imperialism under its leadership – currently Britain, for example. With its strategy of ‘preemptive strikes’ the Great Power USA is at the same time the chief warmonger among the imperialist Great Powers today. US imperialism cleverly used the attacks of September 11, 2001, on the WTC twin towers and the Pentagon to declare a worldwide ‘war on terrorism’. It has issued itself a license to break international law and set the US war machine in motion against the peoples of the world. But in our opinion, these facts should not mislead us to assess US imperialism as sole ‘superpower’, to invent a separate category for it, so to speak, to portray it as if US imperialism in qualitative terms were something different from the other imperialist Great Powers. We have seen in the last four years in the occupation of Iraq that US imperialism, despite its military strength, is not able to control everything, is unable to enforce all its plans. The armed resistance against the occupation of Iraq deals severe military blows to the occupiers and their accomplices every day. The US imperialists are in a completely desolate situation in which they themselves do not know exactly how they can withdraw from Iraq. They have had to throw all their plans overboard owing to the resistance in Iraq. We are of the opinion that Lenin’s analysis of imperialism is still valid. The invention of ‘superpowers’ as a separate category is an invention of the three-worlds theoreticians which served only to sell the alleged ‘second world’ to the peoples as possible allies in the struggle against the superpowers. US imperialism, even if it is currently the most powerful, is only one of the imperialist Great Powers, whose common ground is the struggle for world hegemony. These facts showing that US imperialism currently is the strongest imperialist Great Power also should not mislead us to direct the peoples’ struggles solely against US imperialism. Not US imperialism alone is the main enemy of the peoples of the world, but imperialism as a whole, the imperialist world system. The imperialist Great Powers squabbling with US imperialism over world hegemony partly pose as ‘peace-loving’, ‘democratic’, etc. This is nothing but deception and must be exposed.


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German, French, Russian imperialism and China, who opposed military intervention in Iraq in 2003 in the UN, are no more or less belligerent or peace-loving than US imperialism. Their opposition against military intervention in Iraq was in truth only dictated by their own imperialist interests. It was clear that intervention by US imperialism in Iraq would mean the annulment of the contracts they all concluded with the Saddam regime and the sole dominance of US imperialism in Iraq. With their opposition the imperialist rivals of the USA wanted to prevent US imperialism from recovering a lost in position in the Middle East in the struggle for world hegemony. Not to see such powers as ‘main enemy’, to consider US imperialism the sole main enemy, is theoretically wrong; in practical politics it leads to accepting enemies of the people as possible allies. In 2006, after Zionist Israel’s attack on Lebanon, when a military occupation force was to be provided by the UN, we saw how this wrong approach benefited the European imperialists – mainly the French and German imperialists. They were able to send their troops to Lebanon without meeting major resistance in the Middle East – unlike US imperialism – even declaring them to be a ‘peacekeeping force’. If we really want to work with terms like ‘main enemy’, then unless we want to lead the peoples astray we must clearly say: the main enemy is the imperialist world system in its entirety! That system has to be smashed! And the imperialist world system only can be fought successfully if we understand that the main enemy of each division of the international proletariat stands ‘in its own country’, as the German communist Karl Liebknecht correctly observed in 1915 in the face of social-patriotic calls to ‘fight for the fatherland’, to ‘defend the fatherland’, etc.! This he said in an imperialist war, in an imperialist country. In this connection we want to talk specifically about our country: Turkey is a client country of imperialism. It is not occupied by the imperialist powers on which it depends – this is mainly US and German imperialism. Its dependence is not a colonial dependence. The imperialists do not rule in Turkey directly, but indirectly through their lackeys, through the Turkish ruling classes. The Turkish state is in a direct way the state of the Turkish ruling classes. They in turn are in league with the imperialist powers. In Turkey the smashing of this dependence on imperialism is one of the main goals of the revolution. The revolution in Turkey is in its first phase a new-democratic, anti-imperialist revolution.

Despite this fact it is our view that it is wrong to portray US imperialism alone, still the Number 1 among the dominating imperialist powers in Turkey, as the main enemy. In Turkey/North Kurdistan the main enemy of the peoples is the fascist Turkish state. It is the state of the Turkish ruling classes, who make deals with various imperialist powers, above all with US imperialism, and are lackeys of these imperialist powers. In their struggles the workers, peasants and other working people are confronted by the Turkish state machinery as main enemy, not by the US state machine, not by US military, police, judiciary, etc. Fascism in Turkey is not practiced by US imperialism but by the Turkish state! In this situation, to conduct the struggle in Turkey/North Kurdistan primarily and directly against US imperialism means that in Turkey the struggle to smash the fascist Turkish state is seen as a minor theater of the struggle. Sections of the ruling classes of Turkey are then even taken into consideration as possible allies in the fight against US imperialism. For example, one of the main slogans of the antiwar movement in Turkey was, ”We will not become soldiers of America!” The fact that the Turkish state was about to send soldiers to Iraq/South Kurdistan not only as ‘soldiers of America’ but as Turkish soldiers, i.e., soldiers who also and MAINLY fight for the interests of the Turkish ruling classes, was ignored! And when the issue of sending soldiers to Lebanon came up, large sections of the Left in Turkey opposed this mission on the grounds that ”We do not want to be soldiers of America!” With arguments like this, these ‘Leftists’ cover up the fact that it is mainly a question of the interests of the Turkish bourgeoisie itself when Turkish soldiers are deployed abroad in Afghanistan, Bosnia, in Lebanon, Somalia, etc. It is the same way in all other countries of the world with the exception of the USA and countries directly occupied by US military in regard to the question of the main enemy. Anyone who, for example, in Germany fights US imperialism as main enemy instead of German imperialism, or who in France fights US imperialism as main enemy instead of French imperialism, etc., etc., is not acting as a revolutionary, a Marxist-Leninist. As far as the inter-imperialist contradictions are concerned, it is a fact that they are intensifying. The basis for the intensification of these contradictions is the struggle of the imperialists, most of all of the imperialist Great Powers, for the ‘redivision of the world’ and world hegemony.


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After the collapse of the Social-imperialist bloc a new array of forces emerged in the imperialist world, putting the redivision of the world among the imperialist Great Powers on the agenda. These struggles for redivision continue today unabated. For a brief period after the collapse of the Social-imperialist bloc it appeared as though US imperialism had won across the board and as if the entire imperialist world were going to accept the ‘leadership’ of US imperialism. The first Gulf War against Iraq in 1991 was a war of all imperialist powers under the leadership of US imperialism. No other imperialist Great Power opposed this war; all accepted the leadership of US imperialism and joined in. But the imperialist front split already during the war on Yugoslavia. The war on Yugoslavia was mainly a war of Western imperialist powers under the military leadership of US imperialism. The winner in this war in Europe was mainly German imperialism, which was adept at utilizing American military power for its own interests in this case. In the course of the 1990s, a serious rival to US imperialism gained strength in the EU, mainly in the quite close alliance between German and French imperialism. The decline of Russian imperialism was stopped. Since the end of the 1990s Russia has increasingly reappeared on the world stage. At the ‘security conference’ of the imperialist powers in Munich in 2007, Russia openly opposed the aspirations of US imperialism to world hegemony. Japanese imperialism, which, although an economic giant, politically and militarily long has been more of a dwarf, has reported back, for the time being still in the role of junior partner of the USA. The rapid economic growth of China has come so far that China slowly but surely is developing into an imperialist Great Power with worldwide ambitions. In Africa China already has become a serious rival to other imperialist Great Powers. In Latin America it is strengthening its positions. This, in particular, is an important new development in terms of the changes in relative strength in the imperialist world. These changes in the power relations are the basis of the intensifying contradictions among the imperialist powers. At the same time US imperialism, relying mainly on its military superiority, also is trying to create

facts for future struggles with its rivals. In the struggle for the redivision of the world, wars are the main means employed by the imperialists. So far the struggle for the redivision of the world has not taken the form of a direct war between the imperialist powers, but of proxy wars in the dependent countries and wars of occupation against these countries. But the sharpening contradictions among the imperialist powers involve a real, growing threat of inter-imperialist wars that can grow into a world war. In the struggle against the ongoing imperialist interventions in the dependent countries, in the wars of the imperialists against the peoples of the oppressed countries, and in the struggle against the developing threat of a direct inter-imperialist war and the danger of world war, we must start from the principle of the Leninist analysis and make it clear to the peoples: that it is impossible to escape imperialist war, and imperialist peace which inevitably engenders imperialist war, that it is impossible to escape that inferno, except by a Bolshevik struggle and a Bolshevik revolution. (Lenin ”Fourth Anniversary of the October Revolution,” October 14, 1921, Selected Works in three volumes, Vol. 3, p. 583)

1. The struggle against the ongoing imperialist, reactionary, counterrevolutionary wars and the danger of imperialist world war must be conducted in a revolutionary manner. War and capitalism are inseparable companions. If you really want peace you must fight capitalism. War imperialist war! Victory in the people’s war! Victory in the socialist and new-democratic revolutions! must become the chief slogans of our struggle.

2. Though bourgeois pacifism can be a temporary ally against a current war or a war in concrete preparation, it must be combated ideologically and defeated because it disarms the proletariat and the peoples and ultimately helps imperialism.

3. The struggle against the danger of imperialist world war must not be waged only against a single imperialist power, but against all imperialist powers, above all against the imperialist Great Powers. A guiding principle of the struggle against reactionary, counterrevolutionary wars and the danger of world war must be: The main enemy is in our own country!

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We must struggle today against current wars and wars in concrete preparation and against the nascent danger of world war. However, concretely this means that in this struggle we must not fight only one imperialist power or coalition, but imperialism as a whole. The antiwar front must be approached today as an anti-imperialist front. At the same time we must act in awareness of our own weakness. We do not have the strength to vary our tactics greatly without ourselves, in the name of tactics and exploiting contradictions among the imperialists, becoming appendages of the struggle of the imperialists among each other. During the last invasion of US imperialism and its allies in Iraq, in the antiwar movement we witnessed how the imperialist rivals of the USA managed in a way to take in this impressive mass movement for their own policies. We saw a similar thing in the antiwar movement against the occupation of Lebanon by Zionist Israel. In the name of supporting the struggle of the peoples of Lebanon against Zionist aggression,

suddenly fascist Islamic forces were welcomed as anti-imperialist revolutionary fighters. In the name of fighting Zionism, in some cases open anti-Semitism came up in the ranks of the antiwar movement. Representatives of imperialist and reactionary powers could again make their mark as alleged opponents of war against Zionism and US imperialism. Until we communists are able to establish among the masses the truth that opposition to war without opposition to the foundations of current wars, without struggle against the imperialist world system and all its powers, necessarily degenerates into support for certain supposedly peace-loving imperialist, reactionary powers – until then this will continue. But to enable us to establish this truth among the masses, we must first make a radical break with remnants of the ‘theory of three worlds’ in our own ranks.

April 26, 2007

Contribution to International Conference The Struggle of the International Working Class, the Anti-imperialist Struggles of the Peoples

and Marxist-Leninist Party Building Bolshevik Party (North Kurdistan/Turkey)

The struggle of the international proletariat as a whole currently is going through one of its weakest periods. This is true both objectively, as concerns the level of the spontaneous struggles of the workers on a world scale, and subjectively, as concerns the level of consciousness and organization of these struggles. In the imperialist metropolises the level of the economic struggles is low, although there are more than enough reasons calling for a fight. In the years since the collapse of the Social-imperialist camp, in all imperialist countries the economic and democratic rights of the working class and the entire working population have been systematically and steadily dismantled. Under the label of ‘reforms’, in all imperialist countries without exception real wages have been and are being cut, working hours extended, labor intensity raised to increase the degree of exploitation of the workers. Millions of jobs get slashed, millions are thrust into unemployment, degraded to recipients of state alms. Unemployment benefits and social services get cut, drastic cuts are made in the benefits of the health insurance funds and pensions offices. Parallel to this, politically hard-won democratic rights are being annulled and internal fascization

pushed. This development goes hand in hand with preparations for war or direct external aggression. The more the imperialist bourgeoisie is able to enforce its reactionary offensive without meeting bigger resistance, the more shamelessly it continues its ‘reforms’. Of course, in the imperialist metropolises there are struggles, strikes and demonstrations of the workers and other working people against these attacks. Since the 8th Conference of the ICMLPO they have even gained in intensity both in terms of the number of such struggles and their different forms. There have been struggles taking place despite and without and partly even against the trade union bureaucracy, e.g., the Gate Gourmet strike or the Opel Bochum strike in Germany. But compared with the assault of the bourgeoisie these struggles are poorly developed and almost exclusively aimed at warding off attacks and protecting what exists. Viewed on the whole, the working class in the imperialist metropolises in its poorly developed struggles is on the defensive. This is the objective situation. As far as the subjective aspect is concerned, we know of no imperialist country, where Marxist-Leninist forces are leaders in the struggles of the working


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class. One can sooner say that a large gap yawns between the (spontaneous and weak) working-class movement and the (even weaker) communist movement. The cases where Marxist-Leninist forces took a leading part in these struggles are rather the exception. In countries dependent on imperialism (neocolonial countries) the level of the spontaneous working-class movement is all in all higher than in the imperialist metropolises. The working and living conditions of the workers are much worse there than in the imperialist metropolises and the attacks of the bourgeoisie and imperialism on the economic rights as a rule mean the destruction of the livelihoods of workers and their fall into absolute pauperism. From that point of view, in these countries there are more reasons challenging the workers to fight than in the imperialist metropolises. But again, compared with these challenges we see here, too, that the level of the spontaneous struggles of the working class in the countries oppressed by imperialism on the whole is not yet sufficiently developed. Of course, there are countries where during the economic collapse the working-class movement gained tremendously in strength and in some cases even raised the question of power. But the fact is that the bourgeoisie in these countries succeeded in overcoming the acute crisis and maintaining its power, as was the case in Argentina, where several governments were swept away by mass movements in 2000/2001. In some countries of Latin America (like Brazil, Mexico, Venezuela) the struggle of the workers is much more politicized than in other regions of the world. In various countries of the world (South Korea, for instance) the workers’ struggles are more militant than elsewhere. But all in all the spontaneous struggle of the workers lags behind the possibilities, necessities and challenges also in the countries oppressed by imperialism. As far as the subjective side of the struggle is concerned, the observation that we made on the imperialist metropolises also applies to most of the dependent countries. With a few exceptions, the union of communism with the working-class movement has not been achieved. The communist forces as a rule do not play any big role in the working-class movement, let alone in the leadership of its struggles. The mass movement of the workers both in the imperialist metropolises and the oppressed countries as a rule is controlled by Social-Democracy, reformism, yellow trade unions. The bourgeoisie succeeds as a rule in preventing the development of these struggles into true class struggle, i.e., the struggle of class against class. Often the struggles of the workers are used by the bourgeois parties as pawns as they gamble for power.

Various factors play a role in the weakness of the spontaneous working-class movement. In particular, due to the utter bankruptcy of revisionism, which sold itself as ‘real socialism’, socialism as a whole has lost its attraction. The imperialist bourgeoisie and its apologists have succeeded in creating a great uncertainty in the ranks of the workers with their campaign of lies about the death of communism and the final ‘victory of the free market economy’. The domination of the labor aristocrats in the yellow trade unions plays a crucial part in this. Also, the possibilities for the imperialist bourgeoisie to bribe parts of the working class with the superprofits extracted from the dependent countries have increased enormously compared to the beginning of imperialism. The chauvinism of the metropolises, which pushes the idea that the wealth accumulated there is something that has to be protected ‘from the hungry hordes from the South’, which hammers into people’s heads the social-partnership ideology ‘We all sit in the same boat’, which functionalizes emigrants, refugees as scapegoats, etc., befuddles the brains of the working people. It keeps the workers from taking more radical, mass action against their own bourgeoisie. In the oppressed countries the lackey bourgeoisie operates with nationalism, religion and the like to divert the class struggle of the workers. The power of the media, the possibilities of the bourgeoisie for occupying the thoughts of the workers are greater than ever before. In this concrete situation, in view of a few smaller successes, in relation to the necessities and possibilities – any announcement of the beginning of a ‘working-class offensive’, even if well meant and an appeal to the liberating power of the working class, is a misjudgment and a prettification of the real situation, a gross exaggeration, and above all an underestimation of the tasks before us. This assessment, on a world scale, is wrong. For imperialist metropolises it is completely wrong. Objectively the basis for a much stronger class struggle exists, also due the tremendous internationalization of capital – which the apologists of imperialism describe with the newfangled term globalization. The objective foundations for conducting the struggles of the proletariats literally and practically as international struggles have become much more mature. For the communists this means nothing less than that today the creation and building of Marxist-Leninist parties is much more urgent than ever before. That is, the opportunities and necessities for the international cooperation of Marxist-Leninist forces are much greater than ever before. We must work much more intensely and systematically to carry Marxism-Leninism into the movement of the working class, to create the missing


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unity of communism with the working-class movement. The situation will change only if the working class becomes aware of its own condition and mission, and only if it recognizes its own strength in the struggles. The anti-imperialist struggles of the peoples It is a fact that the level of these struggles is still more developed compared with the struggles of the working class in the imperialist metropolises. The struggle of the working class in the oppressed countries nowadays, where it in part raises political demands, is mainly, and necessarily, anti-imperialist. In different countries and regions of the world today there are also armed struggles of the peoples which rock the prevailing conditions. In Asia, for example, both in the Philippines and Sri Lanka the armed forces of the people are in a position to carry on negotiations with those in power. In Nepal the popular revolution of April 2006 swept away the old regime. The struggle for a new republican Nepal continues. In the Middle East the struggle of the Palestinian people has reached the point where the founding of a state is not far off despite daily massacres by the Zionist state Israel. In South Kurdistan the founding of a state for the Kurdish nation de facto is on the agenda. In Africa various peoples are fighting for their own state power in the situation created by the colonialists, imperialists and their lackeys. Latin America is seething. Everywhere there are armed formations of the peoples, everywhere the prevailing conditions are called into question. In several countries of Latin America, in the past few years a number of governments have been swept away by mass movements. In many Latin American countries ”Leftist” governments rule today. The developments in Colombia, Ecuador, but above all Venezuela even are propagated by not a few forces of the Left outside these countries as socialist developments. Chavez’s ‘Bolivarian’ socialism is in our opinion nothing other than the program and action of the national bourgeoisie, who are not disinclined to cooperate with imperialism as long as the interests of the national bourgeoisie also come into play. This ‘socialism’ is hyped by many Leftist forces in the imperialist metropolises as 21st century socialism. Frequently we encounter this attitude among ‘metropolitan socialists’ who have abandoned hope in the revolutionary power and ability of their own proletariat and expect revolution to be more likely in the dependent countries and approach the revolutionary movements in the dependent countries in an uncritical way, romanticizing them. They make solidarity work with a revolutionary movement abroad their main task, and the object of solidarity changes according to what is fashionable. Five years ago the Zapatista movement with Subcommandante

Marcos in Mexico was 21st century socialism, now it is Chavez’s movement. In Afghanistan and Iraq, countries directly occupied by the imperialists, the imperialists and their lackeys are confronted with a growing war against the occupying forces and their lackeys. The military losses of the occupying forces and their lackeys increase day by day. The developments in Iraq have clearly shown that the calculations of the imperialist occupiers were completely off the mark. In a brief, bloody war the Saddam regime was to be overthrown, Iraq quickly pacified and a US-dependent government installed, which was then supposed to take over business. Fours years after occupation the armed resistance is stronger than ever. The occupying forces and their lackeys are not even able to protect their lackeys’ parliament, located in the allegedly safest security zone, from military attacks of the resistance. Undoubtedly, the movement of the oppressed peoples is generally more developed today than the movement of the proletariat in the imperialist metropolises. But just as we must make note of this fact, we must also make note of the following: * The level of these struggles, too, is not as developed as in the 60s and 70s of the 20th century. * The influence of the communists in these movements – a few exceptions notwithstanding – is very small. Usually this influence is negligible. * The possibilities open to the struggles of the peoples for taking advantage of inter-imperialist contradictions for their own ends are much smaller than in the 60s and 70s of the 20th century. * The possibilities open to the domestic bourgeoisies and imperialists for suppressing the struggles of the peoples or turning them into reform movements within the system have grown. In the countries dependent on imperialism the building of real communist parties also is the main link to grasp in the work of the communists. Only strong, truly communist, Bolshevik parties are the guarantee that the struggles of the peoples against imperialism and the domestic bourgeoisies can be led with the clear goal of a new society liberated from exploitation. The relatively developed level of the struggles in the oppressed countries (relative to the struggle of the proletariat in the developed imperialist countries) has the effect that not a few within the ranks of the Marxist-Leninists put forward the theory that the contradiction between the oppressed peoples (and nations) on the one hand and imperialism on the other is the main contradiction on a world scale.1 In our view, this statement is wrong. It is theoretically wrong because it is not understood that the world revolutionary process is the sum of


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manifold revolutionary processes in the individual countries. Roughly speaking, the world revolutionary process is the sum of non-simultaneous SOCIALIST REVOLUTIONS in the imperialist countries and anti-imperialist NEW-DEMOCRATIC REVOLUTIONS in the oppressed countries. On top of that the revolution in every single country will have its own characteristic features. It is correct to state the main contradiction for every single revolutionary process in the respective countries, but it is wrong to do this for the world revolution, which basically is not a simultaneous and homogeneous process but the sum of hundreds of revolutions. In practical political terms, establishing a main contradiction on a world level has the effect that one component of the proletarian world revolution – in our case the struggles of the proletariat in the imperialist metropolises – is one-sidedly seen as being dependent on the revolutions in the oppressed countries. The two components of the proletarian world revolution condition each other and mutually support each other. Neither of these two components is the ‘leading’, ‘decisive’ one, while the other ”occupies a secondary and subordinate position” (Mao Zedong, ”On Contradiction, Selected Works, Vol. 1, p. 332). Proletarian world revolution will not be victorious in the manner that first the contradiction between the oppressed nations and peoples on the one hand and imperialism, led by US imperialism, on the other, is tackled and resolved, and then afterwards the ‘secondary and subordinate’ contradiction between proletariat and bourgeoisie in the imperialist countries comes to the fore and can be resolved. There is no one-sided dependence of the two currents of the proletarian world revolution! On the issue of the support of anti-imperialist struggles. The imperialist world is divided into oppressing imperialist countries and countries oppressed by imperialism. The communists must unconditionally defend the right of oppressed nations to self-determination as the right to existence as a separate state. However, for communists this obligation towards the liberation movement of the oppressed peoples to unconditionally defend the right of self-determination does not mean the communists unconditionally support all concrete national movements. Clear criteria for this were established by the Comintern. In his ”Preliminary Draft Theses on the National and the Colonial Questions”, which Lenin submitted to the Second Congress of the Comintern and which became the foundation of the Comintern’s line, Lenin made the following observation:

The Communist International should support bourgeois-democratic national movements in colonial and backward countries only on condition that, in these countries, the elements of future proletarian parties, which will be communist not only in name, are brought together and trained to understand their special tasks, i.e., those of the struggle against the bourgeois-democratic movements within their own nations. The Communist International must enter into a temporary alliance with bourgeois democracy in the colonial and backward countries, but should not merge with it, and should under all circumstances uphold the independence of the proletarian movement even if it is in its most embryonic form. (Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 31, pp. 149-150) At the same Congress Lenin held the ”Report of the Commission on the National and the Colonial Questions” and pointed out that as a result of the Commission’s discussion of the Preliminary Draft Theses it had arrived at the decision to speak of the ‘national-revolutionary movement’ rather than of the ‘bourgeois-democratic movement’. He said: The significance of this change is that we, as Communists, should and will support bourgeois-liberation movements in the colonies only when they are genuinely revolutionary, and when their exponents do not hinder our work of educating and organising in a revolutionary spirit the peasantry and the masses of the exploited. (ibid., p. 242) It clearly follows from all this that the communists must in any case unconditionally defend the right of the oppressed peoples to existence as an independent state against any imperialist intervention. In any case they must support in the national movements the actions directed against national oppression. Beyond that they have only an obligation to support REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENTS. In this case, too, the communists in these countries are tasked with independently organizing the workers and peasants. Today there is a broad current in the Leftist movement which, in the case of countries attacked and occupied by the US imperialists, calls for unconditional solidarity with every resistance movement and wants to prohibit us, so to speak, from making any distinctions in the solidarity movement. We as communists practice solidarity with any resistance directed against imperialist occupation; however, this solidarity of ours with EVERY resistance is limited only to the negative action of resistance. Beyond that we practice solidarity only with the sections of the resistance which are revolutionary. For us this means that in the case of support for the resistance in Iraq, for example, we support the


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struggle of this resistance against the imperialist occupiers and their stooges as a whole, but that as communists we do not support the positive programs of large sections of this resistance, namely that of the Arab-nationalist, fascist Baathists, and that of the Islamic fascists, whether Sunni or Shiite. Conversely, we try to explain to the peoples the true counterrevolutionary character of these forces. As to the forms of resistance, we also do not approve of everything and do not have to do so. Such armed resistance activities (if they are at all actions of resistance) which reckon with the largest possible casualties among the civilian population are not expedient in our view; they terrorize the people that have to be won over in the struggle against the occupying forces. Main task: construction of real Marxist-Leninist, i.e., Bolshevik parties Both in the imperialist countries and in the countries dependent on imperialism the main task of the communists, the main link they must grasp, is the creation and building of genuine Marxist-Leninist parties. Naturally, right from the start these parties must be built up in connection with the class struggle of the working class. For real communist parties are mainly workers’ parties in class terms. A party that calls itself Marxist-Leninist is not a real Marxist-Leninist party, not a Bolshevik party, if it has not united within its ranks above all the most advanced sections of the working class. The theory that reduces the leadership of the working class to ideological leadership is not a Marxist-Leninist theory. In addition, we are of the opinion that any Bolshevik party must pass through roughly two phases in its construction (before the revolution). These two phases are roughly as follows:

1. Period of formation, creation of the party. ”In this period the Party, as a driving force, was weak. … The Party’s strategy – since strategy presupposes the existence of reserves and the possibility of manoeuvring with them – was necessarily narrow and restricted. The Party confined itself to mapping the movement’s strategic plan, i.e., the route that the movement should take; and the Party’s reserves – the contradictions within the camp of the enemies ... – remained unused, or almost unused, owing to the weakness of the Party. The Party’s tactics, since tactics presuppose the utilisation of all forms of the movement, forms of proletarian organization, their combination and mutual supplementation, etc., with the object of winning the masses and ensuring strategic success, were also necessarily narrow and without scope.

In this period the Party focussed its attention and care upon the Party itself, upon its own existence and preservation. … The principal task of communism … was to recruit into the Party the best elements of the working class, those who were most active and most devoted to the cause of the proletariat; to form the ranks of the proletarian party and to put it firmly on its feet. Comrade Lenin formulates this task as follows: ”to win the vanguard of the proletariat to the side of communism.” 2nd Period of winning the broad masses of the workers and peasants ”In this period the Party was by no means as weak as it was in the preceding one; as a driving force, it became a most important factor. It could now no longer be a self-sufficing force, for its existence and development were now definitely ensured; it changed from a self-sufficing force into an instrument for winning the masses of the workers and peasants, into an instrument for leading the masses in overthrowing the rule of capital. In this period the Party’s strategy acquired wide scope.... The Party’s tactics also acquired wide scope.... The Party’s principal task in this period was to win the vast masses to the side of the proletarian vanguard, to the side of the Party, for the purpose of overthrowing the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, for the purpose of seizing power. The Party now no longer focussed its attention upon itself, but upon the vast masses of the people.” (cf. Stalin, ”The Party Before and After Taking Power”, Works, Vol. 5 , pp. 103-106) We are still in the first phase of our party building and we think that today most Marxist-Leninist parties are only in this phase of formation. To us, consciously distinguishing these phases means correctly tackling the tasks of party building. April 27, 2007# Remark 1 We are of the opinion that if we want to talk about the main contradiction in the world, we can only do it in the form of comparing the main forces of the proletarian world revolution and the counterrevolution. This means that the contradiction between the proletariat of all countries and the oppressed peoples on the one hand and imperialism and all reaction on the other is the main contradiction on a world scale. This contradiction is resolved in the proletarian world-revolutionary process by various revolutions in various countries, by socialist revolutions in the developed imperialist countries, anti-imperialist new-democratic revolutions with a socialist perspective in the oppressed countries. #


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Contribution to International Conference Forms of Organization of International Cooperation

History, Present and Future Bolshevik Party (North Kurdistan-Turkey)

In regard to the forms of organization of international cooperation, in our opinion the most advanced form of organization of international cooperation to date, and the form best suited to the international character of the working class, is the Third (Communist) International. The Communist International was a communist world party. What we need in future is a communist world party, But we are a long way off today from the goal of a new Communist International. As starting point for building a new Comintern we first need a common platform. It is our view that such a common platform no longer exists since the complete takeover of power by the modern revisionists in the former SU, i.e., since about the mid-1950s. The 1957 and 1960 joint declarations of the communist and workers’ parties, which both the revisionists and Marxist-Leninists cite as common platform, are rather compromise documents in which right things and wrong things stand side by side. Objectively, these declarations made the revisionist line of the 20th Party Congress of the CPSU, as ”continuation and advancement of Marxism-Leninism”, the basis of the international communist movement. Although the ”Proposal Concerning the General Line of the International Communist Movement” submitted by the Communist Party of China in the ”Great Polemic”, plus the nine commentaries that go with it, are positive attempts of the Communist Party of China to reunify the international communist movement on a Marxist-Leninist basis, they ultimately were unable to fulfill this purpose, and at the same time these documents themselves contained serious concessions to the revisionist line, grave errors. But the main problem was that these documents were not taken as what they are, a ”proposal”, but as a readymade new platform for the Marxist-Leninist world movement. The result is that we as Marxist-Leninist world movement even today have no jointly elaborated platform. The main criteria for participation in the ICMLPO do not suffice as platform for the unity of the Marxist-Leninist world movement and are not intended as such.

As we see it, to develop this platform it would be necessary to assess in joint open and public discussions (public in the sense that one does not keep major differences of opinion secret from the masses) *the founding document and statutes of the Comintern, *the Comintern Programme of 1928, *the Comintern’s policy of the antifascist united front and the 7th Comintern Congress, *the 1943 decision to dissolve the Comintern, *the Cominform resolutions on Yugoslavia, *the Moscow declarations of 1957-1960, and *the 1963 Polemic. In addition, the subsequent attempts at unification would have to be jointly evaluated. It is necessary to make theoretical work, analyses, etc., performed by the various parties alone on these topics, a part of the joint work on these topics. We know how difficult this is, but it can be done. Joint discussions, joint theoretical work is, of course, not the only means of unifying or reunifying the communist world movement. Parallel to this, in practical politics we must make the working-class movement of all countries a truly internationalist movement, must cooperate in joint international action. The objective conditions for this are better than ever before. It is our view that mutual open, public criticism also serves to educate the masses, and that we do not have to be afraid of it. Only in joint practical struggle and in joint efforts to create a political international platform which do not exclude, but include open and public debates and mutual criticism, will the communist world movement grow together again. If we succeed in developing the ICMLPO into a main instrument for organizing the joint platform discussion, it would be a remarkable achievement in our view.

April 28, 2007


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Country Report, USA Ray O. Light Group

The main enemy of the international working class and of the billions of oppressed peoples in the semi-colonial and dependent countries of the world is monopoly capitalism and imperialism, dominated today by global finance capital. In the past few decades the accelerated concentration of capital and the extension of its tentacles into the far corners of the earth has become increasingly referred to as ”globalization” by both its bourgeois and petty bourgeois proponents and opponents. We proletarian revolutionaries know it to be imperialist globalization, that is, the continuation of the development of imperialism as the highest and last dying stage of capitalism, precisely along the lines illuminated by comrade Lenin more than ninety years ago. As he taught, this era also features the new and rising unfolding proletarian revolution. The chief bulwark of this old and dying system is United States imperialism. As the only proletarian vanguard organization from the USA represented in this Conference, we have a great responsibility toward our comrades, especially those from the many other lands oppressed, threatened and brutalized by ”our own” imperialists, to clearly and accurately share our assessment of the current conditions of the US ruling class, working class and oppressed nationalities within the ”belly of the beast”. The Desperation of the United States Ruling Class For almost sixty years, since the end of World War II, US imperialism has been a virtually unrivalled imperialist power. This monopoly position has enabled US imperialism to bribe and brutalize its own population even more thoroughly than previous imperialist powers. But, as Lenin taught, the more powerful the imperialist country, the more precipitous its decline. Now, in less than a generation, US imperialism has been transformed from the foremost creditor country in the world into the greatest debtor country. The extreme parasitic position of the current US economy based so largely on the labor of the working people of Mexico and Central America and South America, of Russia and the former Soviet bloc, as well as Egypt, Turkey, Bangladesh, the Philippines, India and China and elsewhere has placed its parasitic stamp in every sphere of social life in the United States. (Shades of the Saudi privileged Sunni masses --- incapable of doing a

productive day’s work!) ”A total of 3.2 million factory jobs, or 1 of every 6, have been lost since the start of 2000. (AP)” (4-23-07, Christian Science Monitor) In the field of education, for example, the United States is now unable to provide sufficient scientists and engineers; it must import Indian, Chinese and other skilled professionals, or outsource its work. And, ”for the first time, Toyota Motor Corp. has surpassed General Motors Corp. in global auto sales for a quarter, the Japanese automaker said Tuesday.” (4-25-07, Christian Science Monitor) As it has become clear that US imperialism cannot reverse this disastrous economic direction, in order to postpone the inevitable day of accountability the United States has to be armed to the teeth. The emergence of the Bush Regime with its unending global imperialist war against the international proletariat and the oppressed peoples and against any and all its great power partner-rivals for resources, spheres of influence, etc. is the result. Since 9-11, wherever oil and/or natural gas is in abundance, or where strategic transport routes and pipelines for oil and natural gas are at stake, from Georgia in the former USSR to Qatar in the Middle East, to Colombia in South America to the Philippines in Southeast Asia, and especially in Afghanistan and Iraq, US imperialism has sent its military to take control of the world’s oil and natural gas supply in order to keep these vital resources out of the hands of its imperialist rivals and maintain its economic hegemony. Right after 9-11-01, Bush’s rating among the US populace was about 90% favorable. At the time of the 2004 Presidential election when it had already become apparent that US imperialism was still struggling to hold its position both in Afghanistan and Iraq, Bush’s rating had fallen to about fifty percent favorable. Under the impetus of the world capitalist economic crisis, the Bushites were responsible for the unprovoked war, invasion and occupation of both Afghanistan and Iraq, and a new doctrine of ”preventive war” (shades of Hitler Germany). At the same time, they were responsible for waging a war at home in the USA itself — including the rapid removal of workers’ rights to overtime protection and on the job rights, union rights, etc., as well as the rapid erosion of civil liberties with the PATRIOT Act, increases in police state, intelligence and other surveillance forces, and the


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establishment of a massive homeland security department. Bush brought unprecedented tax breaks to the super rich, record government budget deficits to the working people and massive unemployment and underemployment to the masses. Despite all these things, this time Bush received a majority of the votes as tallied (51% to 48%); and almost sixty percent of the eligible voters had cast a vote, up from barely fifty percent in the 2000 election before the 9-11 hysteria and Bush’s launching of the unending war of terror. The fact that virtually the entire US society has benefited, however temporarily and however unevenly, from the oppression and super-exploitation of the workers and oppressed peoples of the entire world, goes a long way in explaining the results of the November 2004 US presidential election. The monopoly capitalist ruling class in the USA, with generations of blood on its hands, and made increasingly desperate and isolated under the impetus of the world capitalist economic crisis, will not surrender its privilege and power on the basis of an election. Comrades will do well to keep this fact in mind as bourgeois democratic illusions about US ”Democracy” (”American Exceptionalism”), and Democratic Party candidates such as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are promoted worldwide in the run-up to the 2008 US Presidential election. The current period in which the Bush Regime has been at the helm of the US ship of state has marked the most dramatic and steep decline of the US Empire. The two years between the 2004 Presidential election and the 2006 Congressional election represented a sea-change in the USA. The heroic Iraqi Resistance, the main force on the frontline of the world-wide struggle against US imperialism, has clearly gained the upper hand militarily in Iraq and has forced the bullying Bush Regime onto the defensive, exposing its cowardly and contradictory weaknesses. The Pentagon’s controller in her ”National Defense estimates for FY 2008” documented that Bush has spent $2.5 trillion in FY 2003-2007), or $400 billion dollars more in the same fiscal 2008 dollars, than President Lyndon Johnson spent on the US military during the comparable five biggest years of the Vietnam War (FY1964-1968), despite the fact that Johnson had four times as many troops in the field and well over twice the total troop strength and was also fighting the Cold War!! Last

month, the General Accounting Office (GAO) lamented that ”Pentagon procurement is out of control.” (”Uncontrolled Pentagon Spending” by George C. Wilson, 4-23-07, National Journal.) The heroic and advancing Iraqi Resistance was the key to Bush’s deep slide in popularity down to a thirty percent favorable rating at the time of the 2006 US Congressional election!! Bush’s Republican Party lost control of both the US Senate and the US House of Representatives to the Democrats. In this manner, by repudiating the Bush Regime, the US electorate expressed its desire to cut the Empire’s losses in Iraq and bring the US troops home. Unfortunately, the Democratic Party is simply the other branch of the US Imperialist War Party. So, Nancy Pelosi, who was about to become the Speaker of the House of Representatives, assured the US ruling class that, in the event of a Democratic Party victory, the Democrats had no intention of impeaching George W. Bush! To appease the US populace after his election defeat, Bush compelled Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s resignation. But with the departure of the principal proponent of a small, well-trained US military, backed by expensive, high tech weaponry, Bush has begun plans to increase US military manpower by a hundred thousand troops. More immediately, Bush has ”smacked the US voters in the face” by announcing, a troop ”surge” of more than twenty thousand US soldiers deployed to Iraq. Yet no US troop increase can repair the damage done to both of US imperialism’s chief pillars in the Middle East --- the Sunni-based reactionary Arab regimes of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, etc. on the one hand, and the Israeli settler state, especially after its 2006 debacle in Lebanon, on the other. The Afghani liberation fighters, whose resolve has also been strengthened by the Iraqi Resistance, have compelled US imperialism and its few allies to increase their troop strength to attempt to avoid military defeat at the hands of the peoples forces in Afghanistan and the ouster of President Karzai, the former UNOCAL (US oil company) employee. The heroic Iraqi Resistance has also inspired the strong anti-imperialist voice of Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez, the popular election of a number of leftist governments throughout Latin America and the economic-political alliances of these forces with the Venezuela-Cuba alliance at its core. Bush’s recent tour of Latin America, attempting to halt or at least slow down this development, was shadowed and haunted by


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Venezuela’s Chavez, the outspoken opponent of ”Yankee imperialism” and especially ”the devil” Bush in this period. At the same time, with a bankrupt economy, the Bush Regime has been unable to increase the imperialist bribery of the US multinational working class. Consequently, the Bush Regime’s margin for error is growing increasingly small, while the caliber of political leadership based on decades of US hegemonic power in the imperialist camp has deteriorated into blatant corruption of all kinds --- bullying, arrogance, ignorance, chauvinism, and rank cronyism. The above helps explain the astounding list of political crises and scandals that have been a more or less constant feature of the Bush Presidency, especially during the post 9-11 period of the so-called ”war on terror”. This long list includes: the financial scandal involving Kenneth Lay, the biggest backer of Bush’s first presidential election, who pillaged the retirement pensions of his Enron employees; Cheney’s Halliburton Corporation connection and the no-bid multi billion dollar Iraqi war and reconstruction contracts followed by the fraudulent billing of these war contracts, adding more billions of loot to Halliburton from the public coffers; Bush’s open contempt for the US Congress, evidenced by his many ”signing statements” attached to newly enacted laws, indicating his unwillingness to abide by them; the decision not to stand for re-election by Texas Republican Whip Tom DeLay due to exposed influence peddling, including the conviction of Republican bagman Jack Abramoff; the resignation and conviction of Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff ”Scooter” Libby for ”outing” key CIA operative Valerie Plame in retaliation for (her husband) former US ambassador Joseph Wilson’s exposure of the Big Lie Bush-Cheney justification for launching the war on Iraq; the recent resignation of several top aides of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and his own current job jeopardy due to blatant and illegal White House political interference manifested in the firing of eight federal attorneys, either for prosecuting key Republicans or for not prosecuting big Democrats; the resignation of the Surgeon General of the United States and the military general in charge of the famous Walter Reed Hospital, now infamous for the scandalous conditions that seriously injured US soldiers have experienced there, which has underscored the fact that Cheney and Commander in Chief Bush view

”their own” US military troops as mere cannon fodder; Bush-Cheney cover-ups of oil company price gouging and record oil company profits --- taking full advantage of the destruction of oil production capacity both during the war in Iraq and in Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath; the Bush government’s illegal appropriation of private telephone company and banking records of most of the US population; the current ”cloud” over Bush intimate Paul Wolfowitz’ job as head of the World Bank for creating a ”cushy” job for his girlfriend in the Bush White House; the continuing assault on US civil liberties through the extension of the USA PATRIOT Act; the continuing use of and justification of torture including at the infamous Guantanamo Bay prison complex; the debacle of a Bush government deal handing over management of six of the most important US ports to the United Arab Emirate-owned Dubai Ports World at a time of Bush-created anti-Arab hysteria as well as the spectacle of Arab emirs allowing their business crony, George W. Bush, to renege on the deal when it became public knowledge; the recent announcement that Cheney’s Halliburton Corporation is moving its headquarters to Dubai. No wonder former Chrysler Corporation CEO and US corporate guru Lee Iacocca, recently expressed the outrage of many US ruling class elements with the bankruptcy of the current US leadership when he wrote: ”I hardly recognize this country anymore. The President of the United States is given a free pass to ignore the Constitution, tap our phones, and lead us to war on a pack of lies. Congress responds to record deficits by passing a huge tax cut for the wealthy (thanks, but I don’t need it). The most famous business leaders are not the innovators but the guys in handcuffs. While we’re fiddling in Iraq, the Middle East is burning and nobody seems to know what to do. And the press is waving pom-poms instead of asking hard questions…I’ve had enough. How about you?” European Union and Japanese imperialist leaders would have never been able to survive such a series of substantial political scandals. Why is the Bush Regime still standing? The Concrete Situation in the USA Today After decades of US imperialist hegemony in the world capitalist camp: the USA has a solidly imperialist bourgeois electoral system that promotes two wings of an imperialist bourgeois war party, an imperialist bourgeois mass media in print, TV, radio, et al., and even to some extent an


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imperialist bourgeois proletariat and anti-war movement. Electoral politics: The entrenched character of this imperialist bourgeois Democratic-Republican Party political duopoly is what enabled Bush to announce a troop "surge” in Iraq immediately after the US voters expressed their will to bring the US troops out of Iraq; it is what has allowed him to keep committing war crimes without fear of impeachment! For the loyalty of Pelosi and the Democratic Party is not to its trade union and working class and middle class ”mass base” but to US monopoly capitalism and imperialism, to the US Empire. Likewise, Bush’s loyalty is not to his mass base of right-wing white Christian fundamentalists and their chauvinist poison against ”the others”, but to his real base of US and international capitalists. This explains his loyalty to the UAE’s government-owned Dubai Ports World in the face of anti-Arab hysteria and to a ”liberal” approach to the question of illegal immigration and ”open borders”. The mass media: Even though there is a worldwide acceleration of technology-induced changes in media communications, nevertheless, mass media has become increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few mega corporations. Especially in the USA, monopoly capitalist control of news information is extremely tight. It is this media that helped convince Al Gore to give up his fight for the US presidency in 2000. It has remained virtually silent on the existence of the Carlyle Group, a giant defense contractor and Saudi real estate company that included both key bin Laden and Bush family and inner circle members at the time of the 9-11 ”attacks”. Currently, while focusing on each of the thirty-two victims of a random terror attack at Virginia Tech (mostly white middle class college students), this corporate media never individually mentions the similar number of Iraqis killed every day since the US invasion and the almost three quarters of a million Iraqi victims of violence in that war and occupation thus far, perpetuating and reinforcing the crucial imperialist idea that US lives are more important than those of other (”lesser”) peoples and suppressing the indisputable connection between US perpetrated violence in Iraq and elsewhere with violence at home including at Virginia Tech. The US working class and trade union movement: With the AFL-CIO leading the

working class in the United States on a course of great nation chauvinism and unity with ”our own” imperialists against our best friends around the world, it is little wonder that the union leadership has been completely unable and unwilling to defend even the short - term economic interests of the US working class against capital. The disarmed US working class has taken a beating on the ”home front”. The minimum wage stands at a paltry $5.15/hour with no increase in more than a decade. Pensions are wiped out. In August 2005, the US Census Bureau’s annual report on consumer income showed that, ”Although the US economy grew robustly last year, the income of the median household slipped … , wages of full-time workers fell, the number of Americans living below the poverty line rose and more Americans went without health insurance.” (ROL Emphasis, Wall Street Journal, August 31, 2005) It was in this grim setting for the US working class that, in the summer of 2005, on the fiftieth anniversary of the merger of the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organization, the AFL-CIO was split up. Six large unions, representing about 40% of the entire AFL-CIO, formed the Change to Win Coalition (CTW) allegedly so that they could more effectively organize the unorganized millions of US workers. As we reported at the time, the split in the AFL-CIO is not principled on either side. This ”split” does not represent the building of a new CIO. The formation of the CIO took place in 1935 when the working class of the United States was clamoring for and building union and other self-defense organization and was not afraid to use the strike weapon and other mass actions in its fight. The working class had strong links with the rest of the international working class through genuine communist leadership of the CPUSA and the Communist International and years of political education by the CPUSA-led Trade Union Educational League (TUEL). Clearly, this is not the US situation today. Those who clamed to want to rebuild the labor movement within the newly formed CTW coalition as well as those who remained in the AFL-CIO flunked an early test. In August 2005, less than one month after the AFL-CIO ”split”, 4,400 mechanics, represented by AMFA (Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association), went on strike against Northwest Airlines, refusing to accept massive concessions and job reductions as so many other


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airline unions had done. Like PATCO a quarter of a century ago, AMFA, an association built on the raiding of other unions, was a pariah in the organized labor movement. Just as with PATCO, if other airline unions had honored the Northwest mechanics picket lines, the strike could have been won. Instead, the strike was lost, and the US monopoly capitalist class was the victor. Unions in both the AFL-CIO and the CTW Coalition represent airline workers. Both consciously refused to stand in solidarity with the mechanics and both share responsibility for the labor setbacks that have occurred since. Since 2005, SEIU President Andy Stern, the most imaginative of the ”new” CTW leaders, in the name of trying to enlarge SEIU’s membership base, has made unprecedented ”sweetheart” agreements both with Walmart and with the largest corporations in the California nursing home industry over the heads of his own membership and staff. This is a bad omen concerning the future of US organized labor as we know it. In the meantime, in a radical departure from most of the recent history of organized labor in the USA, thirty-four thousand bus and subway workers in New York City, members of Transport Workers Union Local 100, carried out a bold though brief strike against the Transit Authority during the height of the December 2005 Christmas shopping season. With militant and enlightened local leadership, these workers overcame such obstacles as their own union bureaucracy’s betrayal, the threats of the New York City Mayor, and the fears of the population regarding a prolonged strike during the key holiday buying season of the year. Their strike was a rare shining moment for US workers in this period and provides hope for better days ahead. The Afro-American people: Among the Afro-American people in their Black Belt South homeland, the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina and the breaching of the levees in New Orleans and the surrounding Gulf Coast area led to the forced dispersal of more than a half a million people. The brutal treatment they received from their ”rescuers” from the Department of Homeland Security, the National Guard and other US military troops was akin to the treatment that the Iraqi masses have received from the Bush-led occupation army in their Iraqi homeland.

Twenty months later, most of the 70% majority Afro-American population has still been unable to return to their homes. This has been nothing short of ethnic cleansing for the ultimate profit of the same banking elite that has run New Orleans since slavery times (when New Orleans was the richest city in the USA), for more than a hundred years in conjunction with the Rockefeller Chase Bank elements. This terrible crisis for tens of thousands has underscored the importance of the fight for the Afro-American peoples’ right to return to New Orleans and need for Land and State Power in the Black Belt territory of their homeland. The continuing struggle against systematic police brutality aimed at the Afro-American national minority workers in the US North also underscores the importance of the exercise of the Afro-American people’s national right to self-determination in the Black Belt homeland. Immigrant workers: In 2006, in a spectacular display of worker activism in the USA, several million mostly immigrant workers demonstrated on May Day. Faced with the threat of being criminalized, massive mobilizations of immigrant workers took place in cities and towns throughout the USA in the early part of 2006. Initially, the mostly Latino immigrant workers were so worried by the ”criminalization” bill that there was much support for various ”liberal” Senate proposals. This was a ”liberal” trick-bag, supported by President Bush, whereby immigrant workers could end up supporting their own semi-feudal enslavement in guest worker programs that might provide a ”path to legalization”, directly tying their status in the USA to their employment. The growing momentum in the weeks and months leading up to May Day was so enormous and so inspiring to the participants that the initial defensive posture of the immigrant rights groups with their demand to stop the criminalization bill was replaced by the more militant mass demand for immediate amnesty. Thus, at least temporarily, many immigrant workers were able to escape the liberal trap. Meanwhile, the Congressional debate and the mass movement it spawned represented some of the greatest political difficulties for the Bush Regime caused by the contradictions between Bush’s mass base of right wing, white supremacist fundamentalist Christians who supported the criminalizing House bill and his real base among


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the monopoly capitalists and imperialists who supported Senate ”liberalism”. In the past year, the US ruling class has used increased immigration raids and deportations by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) branch of the Department of Homeland Security to ”beat down” the immigrant workers and thereby also beat down the rest of the US working poor. Bush has deployed National Guard troops to the Mexican border where they have remained. A fascistic white settler force of ”Minutemen” has become an adjunct force at the militarized border. This tendency toward ”Fortress America” has been symbolized by the Bush-Congress joint and outlandish determination to erect the infamous seven hundred mile wall on the border. May Day 2007 is upon us. However, in the absence of a clear-sighted international communist movement or even a genuine Marxist-Leninist Party in the USA, that promotes both immigrant rights in the USA and national liberation movements in Mexico and Central America, etc., the cumulative effect of the attacks and threats to undocumented workers, and the use of NGO’s, liberals and other ”friends of the immigrants” has disoriented and disorganized many thousands of immigrant workers. May Day this year will feature neither the massive numbers of one year ago nor the militancy of the demands. The liberal trap of a regulated multi-year path for undocumented workers to US citizenship, under the authority of their US employers, especially with the Democratic majority in Congress, now looms as a likely outcome. But the struggle continues, and the spirit of mass protest and defiance still burns in the hearts and minds of many Latino and other immigrant workers. The US Anti-war Movement: Despite the fact that they recognize that Bush launched an unprovoked war against the people of Iraq on the basis of lies and deception, almost none of the forces in the US anti-war movement, including its Trotskyite/Anarchist radical wing, have attempted to mobilize support for the heroic Iraqi Resistance to US imperialism. Most of this white petty-bourgeois-dominated movement, including United For Peace and Justice (UFPJ), view the US war in Iraq as a policy ”error”; and many do not even oppose the US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan at all!

US Labor Against the War, connected to the AFL-CIO trade union bureaucracy, has objectively and effectively defended the US Empire. It has tried to get the Iraqi working class to renounce the liberation struggle against the US occupation: first, by stating that the US had won the war and that the Iraqi working class should accept the occupation and focus solely on trade union rights and narrow ”economic” questions; and later, attempting to provide legitimacy for pro occupation Iraqi trade unions at the expense of patriotic Iraqi trade unions. Finally, a large majority of anti-war protesters continue to support Democratic Party politicians such as Gore and Kerry who promise to be more effective defenders of the US Empire than Bush. Nonetheless, over the course of the past five years, especially under the impetus of the heroic Iraqi resistance movement. organizations such as Military Families Speak Out and Iraqi Veterans Against the War have emerged and represent a substantial and deep-seated opposition within the US military itself. Mainly because of the success of the Iraqi Resistance and also the liberation struggle in Afghanistan, but also partly as a result of this anti-war movement within and among the military and their families, US imperialism is unable to meet its manpower requirements. It is plagued by strategic military overreach. CONCLUSION: US Imperialism is a real tiger and a paper tiger Referring to US imperialism in particular, comrade Mao Tse-tung stated: ”…Imperialism and all reactionaries, looked at from a long term point of view, from a strategic point of view, must be seen for what they are---paper tigers. On this we should build our strategic thinking. On the other hand, they are also living tigers, iron tigers, real tigers which can eat people. On this we should build our tactical thinking.” (Political Bureau Meeting at Wuchang, 12-1-58, cited in footnote on page 98, Selected Works Volume IV) Possessing this strong orientation, communist forces both within the US multinational state and internationally can hasten the crumbling of the US Empire and lead successful revolutionary struggles that will help usher in an era of national liberation and socialism leading to communism.#

1st of Mai 2007

international newsletter no. 33, july 2007 - international conference of marxist- leninist parties...

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