Speech delivered at the XI Meeting of Communist and Workers’ Parties, New Delhi, India, November 20th, 2009
Dear Comrades:
We would like to salute all the revolutionaries of the whole world. We’d like to especially greet our comrades of the PCI and the PCI (Marxist), who have shown us that, in spite of political differences, it’s necessary to build unity of action.
One of the main manifestations of the historical limits of capitalism is the current world economic crisis, which has deeply and obviously revealed all the structural problems of this system, a system based on the exploitation of human beings by other human beings: its contradictions, weaknesses, its capacity to destroy material and social wealth, and its class character. While the capitalist governments invest trillions of dollars to save bankers and speculators, workers pay the cost of this crisis by suffering with unemployment, with the removal of social rights and with deepening poverty.
Although they have been wounded by the crisis, the imperialist countries are conducting a major offensive to try to restore the rate of profit and to combat the rise of popular mobilization taking place all over the world. They promote wars against the peoples, as they are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan. They provide weapons to Israel to threaten the population of that region and expel the Palestinian people from their lands. In Latin America, they develop a policy of isolation and sabotage against the progressive governments of the region, as they reactivate the Fourth Fleet and transform Colombia into a large US military base.
This whole strategy has the goal of threatening Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Cuba and even countries whose governments are unwilling to promote deeply social changes, such as Brazil, to ensure imperialist control over the extraordinary wealth of the continent, which includes the "Pre-Salt" oil reserves, the Amazon, the vast biodiversity of the region. and the Guarani Aquifer, in the south.
The crisis demonstrates the necessity for peoples to oppose capitalist barbarism and to find alternatives in order to build a new human social order. All over the world, especially in Latin America, people resist and try to build alternative projects based on popular mobilization. Cuba’s heroic struggle is the example to be followed, an example that will be remembered as a historic milestone of a people’s resistance against imperialism.
In this scenario, Brazil has been playing a decisive role in the continental balance of power, but clearly within the capitalist order and not to promote change towards socialism. With the aim of becoming one more world capitalist power, the present government, in some cases, has adopted positions that may be contrary to some interests of U.S. imperialism.
However, these "progressive" positions have the goal of creating a third pole of Latin American integration, aligned with the interests of the capitalist system. In other words, neither 1) FTAA, nor 2) ALBA, but the leadership of a social-liberal block aligned with the Southern Cone countries, driven by forces that also behave as a "responsible left", which is reliable in the eyes of imperialism and of the local elites, and which contributes to deepen the isolation of those countries that have chosen the path of popular mobilization and confrontation with imperialism.
Its institutional support to some Latin American leftist governments has been helpful to the expansion of Brazilian capitalism, which expands around the continent, where companies from Brazil behave like any other multinational enterprises. As the main objective is to include Brazil as a capitalist power in the world Lula’s government does not hesitate to undertake imperialistic actions, such as when Brazil insist on the occupation of Haiti to support a right-wing coup d’etat, or when the Brazilian Government diplomatically retaliates against Ecuador to defend a Brazilian company’s construction project, or when the Brazilian Army promotes military exercises on the border with Paraguay – using live ammunition – to defend Brazilian soybean farmers settled in Paraguay facing the Paraguayan peasant movement, or when the Brazilian government insists in keeping the conditions of the Itaipu Treaty which are unfair to Paraguay.
Brazilian capitalism is part of the global accumulation process and iis integrated into the world imperialist system. The Brazilian ruling classes are inextricably linked to international capital. The Brazilian bourgeoisie does not dispute its hegemony with any pre-capitalist sector in Brazil. It is the other way around: it primarily disputes space within the imperialist capitalist order, though it remains subjected to it, especially to avoid the possibility of a revolutionary process, in which the proletariat might emerge as a protagonist.
The present development status of productive forces is enough to solve the needs of the whole world’s population, but it is in full contradiction with the form of bourgeois production relations which privately accumulate the socially produced wealth. Capitalism is definitely antagonic to human life. So, it is time to create the conditions to overcome this system in order to promote socialist revolution.
Latin America will stay an important sphere of struggle against capital, as important social change processes are articulated around ALBA in a clear opposition to imperialist sectors – including many sectors of the Brazilian bourgeoisie — which dispute the hegemony over markets and the natural resources of the region.
The Communists of the whole world must work together to denounce and defeat the paramilitary, terrorist state of Colombia, what is part of the struggle to strengthen the support to Socialist Cuba and to deepen the processes of social change taking place in Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, and possibly in Paraguay and other countries.
We must keep on denouncing the coup d’etat in Honduras and keep on fighting for democracy and social change. We must fight for peace and democracy in all Latin America . We must denounce the creation of the seven U.S. military basis in Colombia. We must offer total solidarity to the Colombian Communist Party and oppose the criminalization of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), as well as its right to be recognized as a political organization. Every people has the right to choose the necessary form of fighting against oppression.
Finally, we would like to propose that this meeting take steps towards the strengthening of the ties between our parties and the increasing of both the number and the quality of our joint actions: The first one is a common public letter, signed by all of us, to the Colombian Government, demanding the recognition of the FARC as a political organization. We also propose the organization of regional meetings of the Communist and Workers’ Parties in all continents.
Long live the Communist and Workers’ Parties!
Long live proletarian internationalism!
Thank you.
November 20, 2009
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