Communist Party (Switzerland) | Nil Malyguine
Dear comrades!
It is a great honor for me to attend, together with all of you, in this conference of the World Anti-Imperialist Platform. I would like to thank the organizers of this event, the comrades of the People’s Democracy Party of Korea, for gathering us, here, today, at a time that posterity will define as pivotal for human history.
For years we have hoped that the transition from a unipolar to a multipolar world could happen peacefully. We hoped that the imperialist tyranny of the United States of America and its vassals could be succeeded by a world order based on respect for international law, good neighbourly relations between states and the principle of non-interference, mutually beneficial trade and win-win cooperation. The progressive action of the BRICS countries, whose historical contribution should never be underestimated, boded well for a positive and bloodless outcome of this transition.
But this was not destined to happen. The imperialist core was unwilling to accept the collapse of its hegemony. We witnessed this last year when the war in Ukraine, long prepared by NATO hierarchies against Russia, finally broke out. However, the Russian Federation’s military intervention in Ukraine also demonstrated another fact: that sovereign countries, free countries, are no longer willing to suffer Washington’s anguish without retaliating. Russia marked a starting point for the whole world that seeks multipolarity: from now on it will strike back.
But the conflict is likely to expand to other scenarios as well. U.S. provocations regarding Taiwan, in violation of the One China Principle, are becoming more and more insistent, with the clear goal of triggering another war on the Asian shores of the Pacific Ocean. A war in which, like the one in Ukraine, the United States will send those countries that, despite themselves, are under the American boot to die on the front lines.
Biden’s visit to Papua New Guinea on May 22 is not to be underestimated: the Chinese choice to cooperate with emerging nations has not pleased the U.S., which will try to threaten the government of James Marape, since the latter – despite being part of the British imperialist Commonwealth – has chosen to cooperate closely with Beijing. Immediately afterwards Biden will chair the quadrilateral security meeting in Australia (of which India is also a member), and this confirms that the fates of peace or war are decided in the Pacific. That is, on May 24, we will find out whether India will disengage from the Atlantic bloc, seeking a return to nonalignment, or it will agree to help Australia, Japan and the United States in the deflagration of the war in the Pacific. A war that would then be worldwide.
Euro-American imperialism is pushing the planet toward World War III in a desperate attempt to save the current global order. The countries that support multipolarism do not want this war and have done everything, in the past two decades, to avoid it, promoting a global change that excludes war as a means of regulating international relations.
China is still trying very hard to avoid such conflict: we’ve seen it with the enactment of the shared security plan of Comrade Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Communist Party of China. But how can we, political parties in the opposition, support this plan? By connecting our struggles: right now we know that the Communist Party (Italy) is collecting signatures against NATO, the same is happening in Turkey thanks to the Vatan Partisi, we in Switzerland are collecting signatures to stop our government from joining military alliances, and so on. We have to unite beyond our ideological and class differences in order to weaken NATO, but we have to do it on a mass level, since small actions fail to create consensus and legitimacy among the European population. We must seek dialogue with the largest communist parties in Europe (such as the German and the Portuguese), but also with non-Marxist-Leninist organizations, which can also be essential to achieve our goal. We should also seek alliance with the World Trade Union Federation and the World Peace Council.
As the Leader of the Communist Party of Switzerland, General Secretary Massimiliano Ay, said:
“Today we are called upon, as communists, to read the changing world, to identify its contradictions, to determine which contradiction is primary and which is secondary. Without carrying out this exercise we would not be up to the Marxist method: we could repeat many fine ultra-revolutionary, far-left slogans, but they would be useless because they would simply be out of phase. The class struggle today is based on a primary contradiction, which is that Atlantic unipolarism (i.e., imperialism) is attacking the Russian- and Chinese-led Eurasian area, i.e., multipolarism. On this basis we read all other contradictions, which then become secondary.”
Unfortunately, not all communist parties in the world understand this. Simplistic and harmful readings of the current situation are unfortunately common, even from historical parties with a long tradition of struggle. Such are the claims that the war between Russia and Ukraine, and the NATO bloc behind it, would be an inter-imperialist war.
A false claim in every respect. The Russian Federation intervened militarily in a conflict that had already been ongoing in Ukraine for eight years, sparked by the NATO-sponsored Euromaidan coup in 2014. Russia intervened to stop ethnic cleansing against Russians in Ukraine, and to foil plans for further advancement of the Atlantic Pact. And it did so only after years of trying to resolve the conflict diplomatically, within the framework of the Minsk agreements, which instead Ukraine and its Western guarantors only pretended to support. There is nothing imperialist about Russia’s action.
But even if one’s willing to deny the legitimacy of the Kremlin’s motives, Russia cannot be imperialist simply because its stage of capitalist development is far from the imperialist one described by Vladimir Lenin. In short, communists who blather on about the inter-imperialist nature of this war are ignorant of both its deep historical and geopolitical origins and basic Marxist-Leninist theory.
The doctrine of equidistance, which can be summed up in the maxim “neither Washington nor Moscow,” typical of certain Marxist traditions, today as in the past is only an obstacle to the development of the labor movement in the world. The failure to understand that capitalist nations, such as the Russian Federation, can (and do) play a progressive role today can only lead the world revolutionary movement into a dead end. Those who deny the fundamental role of Russia and China in stemming U.S. unipolarism, by calling Moscow and Beijing imperialists themselves, are denying a political alternative for the peoples of emerging countries. Not only that, such an approach also puts progressive forces inside the imperialist core countries in a difficult position, which, without a multipolar model to aspire to, would be forced into passive and dead-end resistance.
There is an internal conflict going on within the bourgeoisie in Switzerland: currently the pro-NATO current is prevailing and wants to destroy our neutrality by intensifying the rapprochement with the Atlantic Pact. However, the Communist Party, the Swiss Peace Movement and the ultra-nationalist Swiss People’s Party are each working in their own way to include integral neutrality in the Federal Constitution. Obviously, the challenge is great because Switzerland’s diplomatic credibility, after joining the European sanctions against Russia, has utterly collapsed, and also because the social democrats and the ecologists have betrayed their original pacifist principles and are now calling for the export of weaponry to Ukraine, while fomenting Russophobia day after day. The Communist Party is now called upon to connect the patriotism of the working masses, who want neutrality, with communist internationalism, so that the defence of national sovereignty does not turn into closure and selfishness. Unfortunately, contradictions also emerge in the pacifist movement: a large part has succumbed to liberal fashions and in fact legitimizes the dominant narrative hostile to anti-imperialist nations, while the other part (which shares our ideas) is often still influenced by petty-bourgeois tendencies that emphasize the contradictions – albeit true – about the history of Swiss neutrality. It is of utmost importance to know that the bourgeoisie is not monolithic: from this follows that we must learn how to ally tactically with those bourgeoisies that want multipolarism and do not want to obey NATO.
In Switzerland (and in most countries of the world actually) we are not yet at the stage of socialist revolution, we are at the stage of aggregating all political forces that can work toward the same goal. The Chinese Communist Party understood this by reforming and opening up 40 years ago, which made it possible to develop the productive forces to the maximum. This makes in turn possible today, for a fundamentally socialist country like China, to have the strength to counter the Atlantic bloc. Instead, we who are not ruling parties, must develop to the maximum our united front of truly patriotic political forces, avoiding sectarianism and accepting that the bourgeoisie is not monolithic and therefore we can exploit its internal contradictions. We should always keep in mind the difference between strategy and tactics.
Understanding the current historical phase, and consequently developing appropriate strategies of struggle, is perhaps the main task of any genuine revolutionary. And the current historical phase sees as its main contradiction the clash between Euro-American imperialist hegemony and the Eurasian multipolar order, not the one between capitalist and socialist countries. To read reality on the basis of the latter dualism is to have remained stuck in the previous historical phase, that of the Cold War. Misunderstanding the current phase can only lead to catastrophic results. On the contrary, the right assessment of the primary contradiction of our era is the key to the success of the class struggle in the 21st century.