“How do we defend the unity of the international anti-imperialist front and collaborate with the national liberation movement”

Dear comrades:
In the name of Unión Proletaria (Spain), I bring you warm greetings and I wish to expose two questions to you.
The first one is directed to defend the unity of the international anti-imperialist front and to combat the incoherent theory that all countries are imperialist.
Capitalism has been formed in Western Europe. In Capital, Marx says that capitalism came “into the world dripping blood and mud from its pores, from head to toe”. In our subcontinent, it used the most violent methods to expropriate and proletarianize the majority of peasants and artisans. But it also needed to plunder and colonize entire peoples from other continents.
This is how Marx puts it: “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. (…) In fact, the veiled slavery of the wage workers in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the new world.”
Therefore, from its beginnings, capitalism has been based on the exploitation of some nations by others, that means, on the division of the world into two types of countries: exploiters and exploited.
It is true that, in the first half of its existence, this exploitation had a positive consequence: the transformation of individual and scarce productive forces into social and abundant productive forces that allow humanity to move from the stage of social antagonisms to the socialist stage as a preliminary step towards communism.
Here ends the contribution of the bourgeoisie to social progress. From here on, that is, in the imperialist stage of capitalism, society can only progress by means of the proletarian revolution. While this is delayed, the continuation of bourgeois domination sharpens all forms of oppression, particularly that of the majority of nations by the handful of powers that monopolized capitalist development.
As a consequence, it also sharpens the division of the proletariat by nationality and, within the oppressor countries mainly, the split between the exploited majority and the minority labor aristocracy, bought with the colonial and neocolonial profits of their capitalists.
In such conditions, the revolutionary proletariat encounters the biggest difficulties: in the oppressive nations, it suffers the continuous sabotage of that corrupt elite and, in the oppressed nations, the aggression of foreign imperialist armies. Today, the possibility of the present war spreading to other countries of Eastern Europe and breaking out in East Asia is closer than it was a year ago.
It is, therefore, in the best interests of class-conscious workers to support the liberation movements of these oppressed nations, whatever their contradictions and shortcomings. And it is counterrevolutionary in the highest degree to turn our backs on these movements:
1) either because their leading forces are bourgeois or petty bourgeois.
2) either because an imperialist character is attributed in an abstract and not concrete manner to nations which, like China and Russia, have become military and economic powers. This pretext hides how they achieved it: by freeing themselves from the claws of the real imperialist powers that have imposed their domination on the world during the last centuries. Russia and China do not have the same genealogy as the imperialist states and their conflict with them is not of the same nature as the First World War. To transfer mechanically Lenin’s conclusions on this war to the present international contradictions is contrary to dialectical materialism, to the worldview of Marxism-Leninism.
We do not deny the need to warn the working class about the contradictions that can weaken the struggle against the imperialist West. We even admit that, in the future, the capitalist relations of the emerging powers could develop to the point of replacing the present international imperialist system with a new one. But, over and above speculations, we Marxist-Leninists must concretely analyze the concrete situation and carry out the appropriate revolutionary practice. The present conditions demand that we unite all possible popular forces with China and Russia, as the economic, political and military vanguard of the International Anti-Imperialist Front, against the United States and its satellites. Only in this way will we be able to liberate the initiative and the revolutionary potential of the proletariat in all countries.
The second question we want to present to you is about the problem of how to build a real force in imperialist countries like ours that could collaborate with the national liberation movement in destroying imperialism. Here the political control over the population is suffocating, and it is even worse where the treason of the revisionists has caused greater decomposition in the communist ranks, as is the case of Spain.
After the massive mobilizations in the 1980s against NATO membership and against the Iraq war in 2003, we experienced a slight recovery in the run-up to the Atlantic Alliance Summit protests in Madrid last year. But the unprecedented Russophobic campaign unleashed by the imperialists after Russia’s Special Military Operation in Ukraine weakened these preparations, although demonstrations with thousands of participants were held in major cities.
However, the unity of this incipient movement soon broke down, due to the paralyzing maneuvers of the reformist parties which were part of it and which, at the same time, participate in the Atlanticist social-democratic government. And, unfortunately, many of the revolutionary organizations have a sectarian attitude: they refuse any unity of action with those vacillating forces, they are wary of widening their ranks and avoid going out to meet the population under the pretext of their own weakness.
On the one hand, the development of the struggle against imperialism demands criticizing the reformists who submit to it and denouncing the imperialists who present themselves as social reformers. But, on the other hand, we must understand that the greatest possibilities of broadening our forces is with the left-wing people who fight the reactionaries on various fronts and who will only be able to advance towards anti-imperialist positions if we link ourselves to them, and to their economic and democratic needs.
This linkage requires us to adequately manage the contradictions between the imperialist parties, as well as between the imperialist “left” and its masses. In our opinion, the construction of the anti-imperialist united front in the oppressor countries must be inspired by Lenin’s approach to the united front of the working class when it is unable to sustain its offensive. This workers’ united front was the nucleus of the anti-fascist popular and national fronts organized by the Communist International to regain the revolutionary initiative. We find a particular example of its application—with its positive and negative lessons—in the article of comrades Nina Kosta and George Korkovelos on the Greek revolution.
We propose to study together this question and to propagate practical initiatives that follow this orientation.
It is of vital importance for humanity that the international communist movement makes an effort to further develop the world anti-imperialist struggle in a united front. It is necessary to spread the Marxist-Leninist theory to the working class and to develop the communist movement in each and every country.
Long live the unity of the world anti-imperialist front!
Long live the international unity of the working class!
Down with revisionism and sectarianism! Long live Marxism-Leninism!