Comrades,
The Communist Party of the Peoples of Spain has analysed in its 8th Congress, that took place this same year, before the delegates of many of the Parties present here today, the central subject of this yearly international meeting of Communist and Workers Parties. The documents (theses) approved in our Congress are at your disposal in Spanish. In the time I have I am going to resume these Congress considerations.
Firstly I will remind the 22 most important world realities in our opinion (the list could be much longer):
1) more than 3000 million people in the planet live with less than 2 dollars per day;
2) wars in Iraq and several areas in Asia, among which we have to analyse the nuclear test of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the answer from UN;
3) aggressions permitted, even supported by the imperialism, from Israel to Palestine and Lebanon;
4) verbal, economical and even military constant attacks to the Bolivarian and Cuban Revolutions;
5) U.S.A. gives itself the right to decide which countries can administer the satellites that control more and more what happens on Earth;
6) the servile attitude of United Nations, even of its new Human Rights Commission, which is still under control of the imperialists;
7) justification of the use of torture and other breakings of the Human Rights to fight the revolutionary armed struggle, fair in many occasions;
8) ecological imbalance to continue with the incoherent energetic consumption and the great industrial business;
9) thousands of deaths per year of immigrants who have less rights to cross the borders, mainly if they come from Africa or Latin America, than the products which the multinational companies trade with;
10) the failure of the first project of a Constitution for the European Union, which Germany and other countries wish to revive;
11) the progressive increase of non-participation rate in elections in the working and popular districts;
12) the rise of the European extreme right in too many countries, because of the discontent of the popular layers who are politically uneducated;
13) continuous losses, with the complicity of the trade union bureaucrats, of the workers’ victories obtained in the last decades of the past century;
14) constitution, on November 1st and 2nd in Vienna, of the new international trade union, merger of the social democrat trade unionism and Christian reformist trade unionism;
15) resurgence of class trade unionism that has always been supported by Communist Parties, the World Federation of Trade Unions, that renewed its directorship (now its Secretary General is a comrade from KKE, Communist Party of Greece) and its methods and work schedule in Havana, less than a year ago;
16) political changes and new alliances in Latin American countries;
17) potentiality proved of the great international activity in solidarity with the five Cuban heroes detained in U.S.A.;
18) new coordination of the grass-root movements against neoliberalism, with different expressions;
19) difficulties of those who really rule and decide, inside global capitalism, to carry out their meetings due to the popular protests (the cancellation of the meeting at Barcelona of Housing Ministries of European Union is one more example);
20) continuity of the efforts to illegalise communists, with the recent affair of the Czech Communist Youth (KSM);
21) important resurgence of the Non Aligned Movement Summit; and
22) progressive improvement of the joint work of communists and revolutionaries, as reflects this new meeting of Communist and Workers Parties in which we are participating.
These 22 affairs show us that there are serious problems to fight against and, at the same time, real perspectives of success if we can identify correctly the enemy of our planet’s inhabitants. Capitalism, in its actual expression of imperialist neoliberalism, is the real enemy, and at the same time it reminds us the complexity of our political battle. Those who criticized communists’ internationalism are the ones that today are working internationally with greater coordination and effectiveness.
We, those who historically have been defenders of the working class’ internationalism, are still giving shy and slow steps in the coordination of our different capacities. It is true that we are making progress year after year, but we still do not put all our common potentialities at the service of the necessary elimination of capitalism as the world’s economical and political organisation, as the direct cause of imperialism that strengthens the armaments race, energetic incoherence and the plunder of the planet’s wealth in a new shape of colonialism.
This meeting of Communist and Workers Parties is a new step forward in which every organization contributes according to its possibilities, capacities, criteria and wills; but we have to recognize that the successful experiences of sharing our ideas and actions are still very few.
From de Communist Party of the Peoples of Spain we want to greet the meeting that took place in April for education matters and also the urgent meeting that took place last August to take part as communists against the genocide made by Israeli state, as well as the recent joint resolutions last October, one in solidarity with Cuba (although we think that many more signatures could have been collected) and other one to denounce the privatisation of education in the European Union. Now we can analyse together what has been done against the illegalisation of the Czech Communist Youth (similar to what happened when the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe approved its anticommunist resolution at the beginning of this year), and think if we should make joint actions as well as joint texts. Those are new steps that can make us see our limitations but, at the same time, the enormous possibilities that anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist struggles, will have in the not so far future.
It is also true that difficulties have risen. We know them in Spain and in other countries, with the difference in the analysis about the opportunity or not of the intervention of United Nations troops in Lebanon. The manipulation of this organization by Yankee and European imperialism is showing what will be the result. Instead of disarming the aggressor, that is Israel, they occupy the aggressed country. The Zionist lobby is still very influential, so in European Union as in United States.
There is another field of coordination for those who are here, the Party of the European Left. It is a right of any organization to sum up the efforts with those who are more coincident, but that should not be a slow down to initiatives in which we all can agree. On the other hand there is a doubt about how the decisions of the Party of European Left are influenced by its acceptance of the European Union rules.
Another field in which Communist and Workers Parties have historically taken part successfully is the direction and organization of mass struggles in the fight against fascism. The heroic International Brigades that went to Spain 70 years ago and the devotion of communists helping the USSR against hitlerian fascism are a lesson for us all. Lesson that now we should take advantage of more than ever, when fascist options are reappearing strongly in different places. The attempts on last January in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe to illegalise the communists and the difficulties of some brother parties to be able to act openly as communists should be more present in our collective work.
We could say the same about the role of the communists in the head of the popular and workers’ struggles that meant important conquests, the wrongly called welfare state, that capitalism is now cutting one by one. There is no real capacity today to respond by the workers of a multinational company against the decisions of their employers. Sometimes, instead of summing up their capacities of struggle, the trade unions fight among themselves to see if they can get for their country some productive processes that before were done somewhere else. The coordination of communists should reach the comrades that depend on the same employer.
We have to recognize that divisions among communists have been a direct cause of our weakening. These divisions came initially from different analysis inside the CPSU and the appearance of trotskyst parties; after that because of different evaluations of the great decisions taken by the USSR, China or Yugoslavia. Today, a number of those differences among communists have been smoothed and we all know and welcome unity processes of Communist Parties that competed against each other and have advance or even are advancing in the way of shaping only one party. In Spain, we are the result of a long and plural process of unity that we consider still unfinished, to sum up all those who sincerely consider themselves as communists.
We are sure that it is not easy to forget the personal experiences, the public political discrepancies and the tensions or confrontations, but now and ever the main thing is to know how to identify the enemy. For communists it can not be other than capitalism in its imperialist expression on 21st century.
A work in which we ALL Communist and Workers Parties can agree is to identify and denounce capitalism as the cause of the main evils of the planet. Those who think that capitalism can be improved from inside, without changing its essence, without finishing with private property of the natural wealth and the great means of production, just like social-democracy has historically thought, will not agree with us.
The exploitation of man by man that was denounced by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto is still the essence of the model of society that we want to destroy, although today it has new expressions that they could not foresee and that we need to know how to analyse.
The great mobilizations that we have lived in the short years of this 21st Century show that the common enemy exists, although not everyone that fights against it can identify it clearly. The great struggles for peace and against the war fight against imperialism; the struggles against poverty fight against capitalism, just as the struggles for a decent housing and the struggles for fair salaries and working rights. The struggles of internationalist solidarity fight against imperialism and capitalism at the same time, but the role of capitalism is not clear for all their promoters and main protagonists. Furthermore, a part of the protagonists of these struggles are more interested in the effects than in the causes of the problems they are fighting against.
We communists wish and need to agree with non-communists in our struggles, but we need to know how to coordinate ourselves as communists to win political influence, in order to get that the majority of those fighting accept that no solution will arrive without destroying capitalism, as we have theorized. I am talking about the presence in the Social Forums, especially when they are regional, continental or world wide. We know that social-democracy considers these forums as a break for the necessary world coordination of an Anti-imperialist Front, but in many countries (partly in Spain) they can be the seed of our participation in the necessary and still not existing World Anti-imperialist Front. The communists are the ones that can make this organized Front exist.
Comrades, we in the Communist Party of the Peoples of Spain are worried about many matters, we also know our limitations and that we have to continue applying in our country the ideas explained here. We will do so, and at the same time we will help in all we can to the advance of the coordination of communists worldwide.
Quim Boix
Responsible for International Relations
Central Committee
PCPE, Communist Party of the Peoples of Spain