Jozef Bossuyt | Communist Party of Belgium
In June 2023 the Communist Party of Belgium held its 37th congress. The party decided to accept a new Political Statement (Program), new Statutes (Charter), and elected a new central committee and a new Political Responsible of the Party.
The party took a standpoint about the actual war in Ukraine: it follows no longer the theory of “an inter-imperialist” war and now appeals to join the worldwide anti-Nato, anti-US imperialist alliance.
The party strives to participate in the international communist movement.
The Communist Party of Belgium, founded in 1922, has a glorious past. It was a member of the Third International. In 1936, it led workers’ strikes for the right to paid holidays.
In 1936 in Spain broke out the civil war of the Popular Front government (communists, socialists and republicans) against the putschist general Franco, militarily supported by Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. Many Belgian communists joined the International Brigades in Spain and even led brigades there.
From these experiences, in 1940 during the Nazi occupation of Belgium, they took the opportunity to organize the first acts of resistance. During World War II, the party led the armed resistance in Belgium against the Nazi occupation, giving the party enormous authority after the war. During the nazi-occupation of Belgium, in May 1941, the leader of the communist party Julien Lahaut, led the strike of 100,000 workers against the occupation, blocking the production of arms for the Nazi army. After the war, the party led the strikes against the return of the king Leopold III, who had dined with Hitler, capitulated, and then fled to Austria. When his son, king Boudewijn, took the oath as the new king, in 17 July 1950, in the Belgian parliament, communists shouted: “Long live the republic!” For this reason, a few days later the leader of the communists Lahaut was shot at the front door of his house by anti-communists. No-one was ever convicted for the murder. Already during the war, the Communist Party had a political line to defeat fascism-Nazism, but not a political line (as in Greece) to conquer power in Belgium after driving out the Nazis. Directly after the war, the armed resistance numbered 40,000 men, and the Belgian gendarmes of the government, returned from London, numbered only 7,000 men. But the leadership of the Communist Party did not oppose the order to disarm the partisans. Resistance fighters opposed, refused to disarm and demonstrated in the streets of Brussels.
After the liberation in 1945, the party accepted US-British control over Belgium. In 1944, 1945, 1946 and until March 1947, the Communist Party of Belgium participated in the Belgian government, together with the Belgian Socialist and Liberal Parties. In 1954, the Vilvoorde Congress rejected the concept of the “dictatorship of the proletariat”. The party fell in the utopia of bourgeois democracy and parliamentarism, hoping for an alliance with the social-democracy. This was part of the world revisionist current in the international communist movement, which was represented by Nikita Khrushchev at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956. This current has abandoned the principles of revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. In socialist countries, it said that the state was “the state of all the people” and the party “the party of all the people”. In the USSR, market economy reforms were carried out at the expense of socialist planning. In capitalist countries, the peaceful parliamentary way to take power has been promoted.
At the end of February 1961, after the end of the general strike of the winter of 1960-1961 against the Eenheidswet (Law of Unity) of the reactionary government, the leader of the socialist trade union FGTB André Renard, founded the “Walloon Popular Movement”. The aim was to replace the struggle against capitalism and for revolution with “anti-capitalist structural reforms” and “federalism”, understood as the struggle of Wallonia against Flanders. “Direct the struggle towards a Walloon solution.” The leadership of the Communist Party then admitted the division of the party between a Walloon wing and a Flemish wing. The Communist Party distanced itself from the Soviet Union, and resumed anti-USSR propaganda during the events in Prague (1968) and Afghanistan (1979). Robert Dussart: “I don’t want anything to do with a party that has blood on its hands.”
In March 1989, the PCB-CPB chose to split into two separate parties, the Kommunistische Partij (KP) in the north of the country and the Communist Party Wallonia-Brussels (PC), a federalization that had begun in the years 60-61. In the 1980s and 1990s, at the time of the counter-revolution in the Soviet Union, there was no longer ideological clarity or unity within the PCB-CPB and then, after the linguistic split, within the PCWB and the KP, which ceased to exist in 2009. In the 1980s, some sections supported Solidarnosc in Poland. Some members, including in the leadership, followed Gorbachev or questioned the very usefulness of the party by wanting to change its name or turn it into a left-wing think tank. This led to a disconnection of struggles, ideological confusion in documents on democratization during the counterrevolution. Politically, the Communist Party Wallonia-Brussels participated in electoral fronts without clarity, sometimes with the Social Democrats, sometimes with the Trotskyists, sometimes with the Greens or more difficult with the PTB. The counter-revolution also created disillusionment in the working class and without clarity in the party, few joined us, creating a generational gap with the older generation increasingly disconnected from the struggles. The party was dying little by little. It is a long process that, starting in the 2000s, led to the transformation of the Communist Party into a regional section of the Party of the European Left.
The Communist Party of Belgium has a 100 years history, with splendid pages, but also with 64 years of revisionism, of which we have to make up the balance. This revisionist line was stopped at the 36th Congress of the Communist Party of Belgium in 2018-2019. The Communist Party of Belgium reaffirmed the original vision of the party of the 1st Congress of 1921, which aligned itself with the Leninist party principles of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks). The party held the 37th Congress to elaborate the intentions of the 36th Congress politically, ideologically and organizationally.
The Political Document states: “The Communist Party of Belgium remains faithful to the teachings of Marx, Engels and Lenin.
A first fundamental specificity is the revolutionary character of our thought and our political action. The goal of communists is the overthrow of capitalism and the construction of socialism towards communism. We therefore do not share the social-democratic conceptions which claim to organize capitalist society and erase its most harmful effects. It is clear that we support workers in their fight for their demands.
But it is above all a question for communists to make the proletariat aware that it will take more than a reformist policy to change society and that only a political and social movement of great importance, organized in our country but also on an international scale, can launch a revolutionary process of profound transformations towards a socialist society.
Today, the first responsibility of all peoples throughout the world and the international working class is to build a global alliance, to resist the US-led imperialist war and to eliminate US imperialism and NATO. This: in every country, on every continent and all over the world.
We invite all social movements, parties and countries to join us in our efforts to unite the peoples of the world. Together, we have the power to stand up to the US-led imperialist bloc and overthrow the colonial system that brings instability, poverty and human rights violations to the masses through political repression, economic plunder and military coercion. The participants in this alliance must develop broad front organizations in their own countries and concrete and practical mass actions against the United States — imperialism and NATO. As a communist party, we must therefore actively intervene in peace movements, in Belgium and internationally, and contribute to their revival and radicalization by building the anti-imperialist front.”