Union Proletariat (Spain)
Dear Comrades:
In Proletarian Union we see with concern that the danger of imperialist world war continues to grow despite the fact that NATO is not achieving its objectives in Ukraine. NATO promises an imminent counter-offensive with new Western arms and troops, while intensifying the military encirclement against China and Socialist Korea.
Confirmation of this policy of aggression are the large-scale naval exercises being carried out in the Pacific Ocean by the United States, the rebel province of Taiwan, France, Australia, South Korea, Japan and the Philippines, involving dozens of ships, including nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, landing ships and attack submarines. These facts demonstrate every day clearly that US, NATO and EU imperialism is determined to wipe out in any way it can, whoever does not allow itself to be dominated by its imperialist interests. At the moment, Russia, China and the DPRK.
Driven by the sharpening of the contradictions of capitalism, the imperialist powers are driven to increase their oppression and aggression against the rest of the countries.
During the 20th century, the victory of the Great October Socialist Revolution, that of the Red Army in World War II and the subsequent enlargement of the socialist camp provoked in the imperialist powers, a general crisis that forced them to submit to Yankee discipline. The temporary defeat of socialism in the USSR and in Europe, due to anti-Stalinist revisionism, gave them hope of conquering world domination. In this way, they could load their tensions on the weakest peoples, as they did in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, etc.
However, the economic growth of People’s China and the other BRICS countries, the recovery of Russia’s sovereignty and the military strengthening of the DPRK have shown that imperialism has not put an end to its general crisis. On the contrary, it is weakening internally, while, around it, the countries it thought it could mistreat at will are growing in their potential for resistance.
Today, the main force of the world anti-imperialist front is the sovereign peripheral states. Unfortunately, for now, they cannot rely on a strong international workers’ and communist movement which, moreover, is the only one capable of eradicating imperialism.
In the formerly colonial part of the world, the democratic struggle for national liberation can acquire a proletarian class character by constituting the necessary starting point of the socialist revolution. However, in the imperialist center and other countries of the semi-periphery, the struggle for national sovereignty in the face of U.S. imperialism will only be capable of achieving, on its own, a social-democratic management of world capitalism as the new institutions of the BRICS demonstrate. For this reason, the front of struggle of the communists is twofold and simultaneous.
While working for the maximum possible unity against the dominant Anglo-Saxon imperialism, we must direct this and all our partial struggles towards socialism, towards the overthrow of the political power of the bourgeois class. Unlike in the neocolonial countries, the bourgeoisie of the imperialist countries can now only play a reactionary, counterrevolutionary role, even if some fraction of this class opposes U.S. domination.
The Russian victory over the NATO offensive in Ukraine seems to be getting closer and closer. However, this will only delay a new world war which will be inevitable if the present state of the anti-imperialist struggle is not resolved decisively towards a socialist horizon. For all these reasons, from Unión Proletaria, at the same time that we support any unity of action against imperialism even with unstable allies, we urge to imprint on it a socialist perspective.
The situation of the movement in the imperialist countries – where the support of the revisionists to imperialism helps the expansion of chauvinism and fascism – is the weakest. Its weakness is the result of decades of colonial exploitation of the majority of humanity by the Western bourgeoisie, of the bribery of the labor aristocracy, of the domination of reformism and revisionism and, consequently, of the growing ideological, political and moral corruption of the population.
This is what we communists who live in the entrails of the imperialist beast must remedy. In the first place, we need to re-educate the working masses in Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism, combating the possibilism and fatalism propagated by the reformists. And, secondly, we need to close the way to the “leftist” misrepresentation of communism that hinders this task, because it distances revolutionaries from reality and the masses.
There are several types of ultra-leftist errors that we must correct. One of them are the neo-Trotskyist deviations that propagate that all countries are imperialist, including the countries that suffer and fight imperialism. To make their criteria credible, they spread exaggerated criticisms and crude lies against sovereign governments, thus collaborating with imperialist oppression.
Another of the errors is that of the classic “leftists” that Marx, Engels and Lenin already fought against: to dispense with dialectical materialism in the work of the masses. For them it is only a question of criticizing reformism, without worrying about the masses being able to assimilate this criticism. They refuse to work patiently in the trade union movement, in the bourgeois political institutions and for the sake of a united front against the main enemy, with the necessary compromises and alliances.
The inability of this “leftist” line to win over the majority of the working class leads to the cult of spontaneity, adventurism and waiting for the “Great Day”when imperialism collapses or is defeated by others, and the masses come to us to give us reason and political power. And it prevents revolutionaries from carrying out a systematic task of educating the masses for the struggle for socialist revolution.
This type of error favors sectarianism, that is, the tendency to split the ranks of communism, the working class and the democratic movements, which in practice benefits the bourgeoisie.
Proletarian Union advocates the need to study and apply to our concrete conditions the experience of Bolshevism and the Communist International in order to cure the revolutionary movement of this false remedy of reformism. Only in this way will the proletariat of the dominant countries be able to contribute more and more each day to the international struggle against imperialism by joining the national liberation movement. Only in this way will we together be able to abolish this outdated social mode of production – which threatens humanity with world war and extermination – and bring to completion the socialist reorganization of society.