Back to main newsThe movement is gathering momentum - The World Communist Movement exposes the international Capitalist recession and rally for a humane Communist future
Thu 17 Dec 2009
Author: The eleventh annual meeting of the world's communist and workers' parties last month represented another step forward in the renewal of the international communist movement.
Financial and travel difficulties reduced the attendance in New Delhi from last year in Sao Paulo, Brazil, when more parties from Latin America were able to attend.
Moreover, on this occasion, delegates due to arrive from Russia, Peru and Palestine were refused exit visas.
Nonetheless, this year's three-day event drew together representatives from 57 parties in 48 countries from every continent.
They included comrades from mass parties in Greece, Portugal, India, Russia and the Czech Republic, from those in power in Cuba, China, Laos, North Korea and Vietnam and from those in government in Brazil, Cyprus, Sri Lanka, Guyana, Nepal, Syria and South Africa.
Some of the delegates and parties forced to operate clandestinely in their own countries were not publicly identified. The main result of the meeting was the Delhi Declaration and associated decisions on joint activity for 2010.
The declaration characterised the international recession as a "systemic crisis of capitalism which demonstrates the need for its revolutionary overthrow," condemning the imperialist powers and their international agencies for pursuing reactionary political and military solutions to the crisis.
The communist and workers' parties pledged themselves to "rally and mobilise the widest possible popular forces in the struggle for full-time stable employment, exclusively public and free-for-all health, education and social welfare, against gender inequality and racism, and for protecting the rights of all sections of working people including the youth, women, migrant workers and those from ethnic and national minorities."
Dismissing social-democratic calls for tighter regulation, "global governance" and the "humanisation of capitalism," the Delhi Declaration insisted that socialism is the only real alternative to what it termed "imperialist globalisation."
The world's communists also decided to co-ordinate action in 2010 to oppose NATO, imperialist war and foreign military bases, celebrate the 65th anniversary of victory over fascism, intensify the campaign to free the Miami Five and observe November 29 as a worldwide day of solidarity with the Palestinian people.
From the centre of the crisis, US Communist Party vice-chairman Scott Marshall revealed that 200,000 jobs were still being destroyed every month in his country, even as bourgeois economists were proclaiming an end to the recession.
"Among young people in the US, the unemployed figures are staggering - in the 16-24 age group only about 45 per cent have jobs. And that number is much worse for African-American, Latino and other racially and nationally oppressed youth," he added.
Contrary to the wholly negative assessments of other speakers, Marshall insisted that the Obama presidential victory had important positive features.
"After 30 years of vicious neoliberal attack on the labour movement, on the working class and people's movements in the US, the election of Barack Obama opens the door for a whole new fight for economic justice, peace and equality," he argued.
In particular, as a prominent trade union activist, he pointed to September's AFL-CIO annual convention, which had elected a new leadership "more militant and more rooted in the fighting industrial trade union traditions of my country."
The US equivalent of the TUC is calling for the break-up of banks "too big too fail," opposing the Honduras coup and is using its unprecedented access to Obama to lobby against the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Eddie Glackin of the Communist Party of Ireland reported on the victory of the political, business, media and trade union Establishment in the republic's second referendum on the Lisbon constitutional treaty.
"The main front of the monopoly capitalist offensive in Europe is the growing concentration of power in the emerging imperialist superstate of the European Union," he warned.
Mr Glackin, a former trade union official, regretted that the movement's strength has been "sapped by decades of class collaboration and so-called social partnership."
But he took heart from the fightback against Irish government cuts in public-sector pay, pensions and welfare benefits, which included the one-day general strike on November 24.
The British and Irish parties successfully amended the Delhi Declaration to strengthen its stance against racism and for rights for migrant workers.
Not even the world's most dynamic economy has escaped the impact of capitalism's recession.
However, Ai Ping from the Communist Party of China (CPC) outlined the Beijing government's response including cutting tax and interest rates, relaxing monetary policy and launching a four trillion yuan (£352 billion) spending programme to "boost domestic demand and improve people's livelihoods."
This included improving access to social security, medical services, free education and affordable housing. Special measures were also being taken to increase farmers' incomes, conserve energy and reduce carbon emissions.
As a result, China's economy was growing at a rate of almost 8 per cent this year.
But even in the 60th anniversary year of its revolution, his country would remain in the "primary stage" of socialism for a long time, declared Mr Ping, director-general of the CPC international department.
Current political priorities included the development of "socialist democracy" and the "socialist legal system."
"There are no references in the classic works of Marxism-Leninism on how to develop socialism within our special national conditions," he pointed out. "The success of the Chinese communists in building a stronger China can not only help enrich and develop Marxism, but also encourage and inspire communists across the world to stick to socialism."
Tripura state Chief Minister Manik Sarka feared that the Doha round of World Trade Organisation negotiations would be used by the Western powers to "prise open the markets of the developing world for the maximisation of profit."
The Communist Party of India (Marxist) politburo member warned that imperialism "seeks to emerge from its current crisis by shifting the burden onto developing countries and the shoulders of the working class, peasantry and other toiling sections" of the world's people. In India, the current crisis has already driven 184,000 impoverished small farmers to commit suicide.
Fresh from convening talks to break his country's political deadlock, former deputy prime minister KP Sharma Oli of the Communist Party of Nepal (UM-L) hailed the "epoch-making transformation process" taking place there.
Since the "ultra-leftists' had been persuaded to abandon their so-called "people's war" in favour of mass campaigning and elections, the "people's movement" had swept aside the monarchy. Now the new republic and its constituent assembly had to protect peace and national unity, while fostering socio-economic development, he insisted.
The Greek Communist Party (KKE), which initiated these international meetings 10 years ago, called for the intensification of the "ideological-political struggle" against right-wing and opportunist forces.
Giorgos Marinos attacked the European Left Party (from which the Hungarian communists have recently withdrawn), social democracy and bourgeois concepts of a "green economy" for seeking to conceal the fundamental contradictions of capitalism.
The KKE has brought together the theoretical journals of 11 parties to launch the International Communist Review online (www.iccr.gr) to challenge what they regard as reformist, social-democratic and revisionist ideas inside the international communist movement.
However, prestigious parties such as those in India, South Africa, Cuba, Portugal and Brazil are not involved in the initiative. Some parties have declined because they fear it could deepen divisions rather than strengthen unity on the basis of Marxism-Leninism.
Affiliation to the international meetings continues to grow. At Delhi it was agreed to admit the Workers Party of Bangladesh, although applications from a number of parties in the Maoist tradition were not accepted.
Next year's meeting will be hosted by the South African Communist Party. What is needed between now and then is for communists and socialists to help galvanise resistance to the ruling-class offensive in their own countries, project an alternative programme of policies and strengthen the international co-ordination of communist and workers' parties in organisation and action.
They must also rise to the challenge to the whole left thrown down by the Polish government, which since Delhi has banned the possession, purchase or distribution of "communist symbols" in any form.
Robert Griffiths is general secretary of the Communist Party of Britain.
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