I. DENOUNCING THE ACCELERATED EURO-ATLANTICIST MARCH TOWARDS IMPERIALIST WORLD WAR
The global situation is increasingly threatening, even explosive, for what remains of world peace. It is being methodically torpedoed by the hegemon of today’s capitalist-imperialist world, US imperialism, escorted by its zealous Anglo-Saxon vassals (“AUKUS”), but also by Japan, which is in the process of rearming, and by the South Korean regime. Not forgetting, of course, the European Union, unfailingly loyal to NATO and slavishly followed by the Macron regime.
Provoked by the continued eastward expansion of the EU-NATO eastwards at the expense of Russia, the unlimited Western military escalation in the so-called Russo-Ukrainian war and the continued aggression of the pro-Nazi regime in Kiev against the working-class, Russian-speaking people of the Donbass are now accompanied by major destabilisation in the Middle East and a permanent worsening of the potentially genocidal siege of the Gaza enclave organised by the fascist Netanyahu and his Washington godfathers. Confident of the impunity that North American protection seems to confer on it ad vitam aeternam, Tel Aviv is now even officially taking the liberty of bombing sovereign Syria too, just as it has already struck Iran. Under these conditions, the risks of a general conflagration between Israel and its Euro-Atlantic protectors on the one hand, and the struggling Palestinian people, the Shiite population of Lebanon and Iran, and indeed the mass of Arab-Muslim peoples and all justice-loving human beings on the other, are vertiginously increasing. Instead of trying to calm things down, the irresponsible Macron can think of nothing better than to go to Israel to propose the formation of a Euro-Atlanticist “Grand Coalition” around the fascist government of Israel, similar, according to the head of the French executive, to the one that Washington once deployed “to bring down Daesh”. Yet who can fail to see that, with its highly predictable geopolitical effects, the realisation of this provocative project could provide a direct trigger for the Third World War!
- At the same time, the United States, obediently assisted by the French Navy 12,000 km off the coast of France (!), is patrolling the Taiwan Strait, violating the diplomatic foundation of Sino-American relations since the historic meeting of Nixon and Mao in Beijing, namely that “there is only one China”! And as if that weren’t enough, the Pentagon is using the Philippine navy to “test” Beijing’s political and military reactions in the China Sea…
- Washington is also nurturing a high-risk military tension with Pyongyang on the Korean Peninsula where, since the 1950s, the US has maintained a whole armada designed to artificially maintain a state of war between the two parts of Korea;
- While the puppet Euro-Atlanticist government of Georgia is clamouring to join the EU-NATO, Erdogan’s Atlanticist and neo-Ottoman Turkey is taking advantage of the global instability to harass, encircle and, if possible, liquidate post-Soviet Armenia. Openly armed by Israel, Ankara is teleguiding Turkish-speaking Azerbaijan (which has just coldly carried out the ethnic purge in Nagorno-Karabakh) to this end, while the EU-NATO is delighted to be able to destabilise the Caucasus bordering Russia in this way. All this is endangering the lives of the Caucasian populations who once lived in harmony within the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics…
- In Latin America, Uncle Sam is laying economic siege to socialist Cuba and trying to strangle the countries of the Bolivarian Alternative of the Americas (ALBA), Nicaragua, Venezuela, Bolivia, etc.
- In Africa, the pitiful and hasty withdrawal of defeated French imperialism has been accompanied by a salutary offensive by the people, notably in Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali, and by manoeuvres by US imperialism to get its hands on the region by activating its local neo-colonial relays, as we recently saw in Gabon. For his part, Macron is starving Niger by setting Nigeria and the CEDAO against it…
As for Kagamé’s Rwanda, his ongoing military intervention is bleeding the Democratic Republic of Congo dry, with the obvious blessing of the Western imperialists. The same imperialists have already sown interference, territorial division and chaos in Sudan!
In short, if all the fronts of this pre-world war “come together” at the initiative of NATO (whose leader Jeff Stoltenberg arrogantly proclaims that “it has the means to hold all the fronts”), the geopolitical situation could quickly become that of a globalisation of war. With, in the background, the almost inevitable use, in the long term if world war breaks out, of an enormous nuclear overkill that could exterminate humanity and all organised life on Earth. It is all the more astonishing to see the Greens, a movement that was once pacifist and opposed to NATO, spearheading Euro-Atlantic interventionism and warmongering in Ukraine and the Caucasus! Not to mention the no less warlike and objectively Atlanticist attitude of the NPA (Besancenot-Poutou faction) on this issue!
The pieces of this possible global conflagration are being fitted together ever more hastily, whereas the serious social, health and environmental problems facing humanity would, on the contrary, require the mobilisation of all existing financial, scientific and technical resources, In short, we need to work together to safeguard the future of our species, and indeed the entire living world, which is under threat! As Marx had foreseen, this distressing state of affairs is the result of the historical degeneration of the capitalist mode of production, which the author of Capital had already said “produces wealth only by exhausting the earth and the worker”. This means that, more than ever, our epoch bears the objective demand for a revolutionary transition from capitalism-imperialism at the end of its rope to the communist society of the future, the advent of which is becoming absolutely vital. If this does not happen, as Marx once envisaged, humanity will be left with “no choice but between a dread without end and a dreadful end”…
II. IN FRANCE AND THROUGHOUT THE WORLD, RAMPANT FASCISTIZATION, THE EROSION OF NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTIES, FRONTAL ATTACKS ON WORKERS…
This imperialist march towards world war on all fronts is accompanied by a general trend, increasingly marked in today’s American-aligned France, which is in the process of Eurodissolution, towards global social regression, accelerated fascistization and even more concealed wage rollbacks, against a backdrop of erosion of the gains of the Front Populaire and the social advances made by the Communist ministers of 1945/47. Speaking only of the European subcontinent, it is the EU and its increasingly despotic proxies in France and elsewhere who are orchestrating the regression on all fronts (in our case: the destruction of pensions, social security, the real value of wages, public services, production in France, etc.). It is also the E.U., linked to NATO, which shamelessly supports the fascist-nostalgic regimes in Italy, Hungary, Ukraine, the Baltic states, etc.; it is still the E.U. which is orchestrating a process of continental fascistization by cultivating the monstrous negationist equation “communism = fascism”: the aim being to demonise the USSR in retrospect, and by the same token today’s Russia, to stigmatise all class activists, to profoundly disorientate young people and to ultimately trivialise the racist far right, religious fundamentalism, annealed anti-Semitism and xenophobia in all their forms (Resolution of 16 September 2021, French Parliament resolution on the ‘Holodomor’, etc.), and even to rehabilitate the Ukrainian neo-Nazi battalions which NATO helped to arm. What hypocrisy to then see these same Eurocrats, applauded by stipendiary “intellectuals”, “deplore” the rise of the far right, while the Euro-Powers in power, led by Macronie, do everything to criminalise their anti-capitalist opposition, however inconsequential, while trivialising the alternative of death and hatred promoted by Le Pen, Zemmour, Ciotti and their European counterparts!
Thus, in the last period, fascistization, social regression and euro-dissolution have made a qualitative leap of a pre-fascist nature. Using the “Israeli-Palestinian” conflict, overdetermined by US imperialism, the Macronist government, led by the ministers of “justice” and the police, has issued a scurrilous circular which criminalises in advance all those, non-aligned MPs, internationalist trade unionists, anti-imperialist activists, critical intellectuals and frankly communist organisations, who reject the government’s narrative of the war between Netanyahu’s “fascist” regime (according to the mayor of Tel Aviv!) and the Palestinian national movement. Freedom of expression is now being severely violated in our country, where parliamentarians who are not strictly aligned with the government and trade unionists of the CGT class are being imprisoned by the authorities, and where the PRCF itself recently had the “honour” of being harassed by “journalists” whose behaviour was crudely cops-like. This fascistization is inseparable from the social destruction of the country (as we can see with the unprecedented proceedings launched by the Macronat against leaders and activists of the CGT-Energie). In turn, this anti-social and anti-democratic ransacking of the country goes hand in hand with the increased vassalization of our country towards the EU-NATO and is accompanied by the liquidation of any vestige of past Gaullist diplomacy (which maintained less unbalanced relations with Russia, China and the Arab world). Euro-defeating France also means dismantling the “one and indivisible Republic” in favour of European-controlled “autonomy” (and therefore greater inequality) for certain “territories” in mainland France (Corsica, Brittany, Alsace, etc.), relegating the French language to a creeping pan-European officialization of Anglo-American, systematically dismantling public services (education, hospitals, postal services, electricity, etc.) and dissolving the French state, not forgetting the ongoing dissolution of Renault, PSA, Alsthom, etc. into transnational conglomerates like Stellantis. These attacks on the nation target the working class and the world of work in all directions. Their jobs, their wages, their access to public services, their right to social protection and pensions, their ability to stand up “all together at the same time” on a national scale are all under attack, not to mention the constant demonisation of our people’s mental references to their revolutionary past.
III. POPULAR RESISTANCE IS SET TO INTENSIFY AND GREAT REVOLUTIONARY STRUGGLES AWAIT US
This global, European and French offensive by imperialist and reactionary circles masquerading as defenders of human rights is capitalism-imperialism’s response to the general crisis of its system, driven by its quest for maximum profit, by the downward trend in its rate of profit, but also by the decline of the US hegemon, doomed to internal political decay (cf. the clashes at the head of the US federal state), economic decline (indebtedness, growing challenge to the global role of the dollar…) and even decomposition…), and even cultural and societal decay (see the shootings that take place every year in schools, churches and supermarkets in the USA).
Fortunately, in the face of this state of affairs, many countries are witnessing an upsurge in workers’ and peasants’ struggles and/or strikes (India, United States, Great Britain, France, etc.).
There has also been a salutary awakening among the people of Eastern Europe, and Russian workers in particular, to the terrifying consequences of the counter-revolutionary destruction of socialism.
Similarly, in Latin America we are witnessing a terrible political battle between the worst reaction (libertarian-fascist, cf. Argentina!) and a patriotic and popular left which, alas, is showing itself to be unequally consistent, socially advanced and ideologically resistant, depending on the country concerned.
We should also salute the general awakening of French-speaking Africa, particularly among its urban youth, who are rejecting neo-colonial Françafrique.
Finally, there is a general rise in the power of the BRICS whose contradictions are profound, but which are nonetheless, albeit inconsistently and temporarily, a powerful lever enabling billions of overexploited and dominated human beings who are fed up with humiliation masquerading as “freedom” to rise up against Euro-Atlantic imperialism, which is currently the main, if not the only, obstacle to a truly humane future for the members of our species.
This is why, without ideologically endorsing everything that is done in the name of resistance to Israeli colonialism or Western politico-military intrusions in Asia, Africa or Latin America, the PRCF will never pit the new Drang nach Osten of the EU-NATO against the Russian Federation allied with the workers’ Donbass. NATO and the Russian Federation allied with the workers’ Donbass, any more than the Pole will ever draw a line of equality between the Macronist power “traitor to the France of enlightenment” (dixit the Malian representative to the UN!) and the young people of Ouagadougou, Bamako or Niamey who are admirers of Patrice Lumumba, Dulcie September or Thomas Sankara. Similarly, the PRCF rejects any form of equidistance (without endorsing any war crimes perpetrated by anyone against children or unarmed civilians) between, on the one hand, the Palestinian people who have been martyred for decades and, on the other, the colonial army of Israel and its American mentor, which is structurally predatory.
In addition, and without deciding in advance the question worthy of study as to whether or not there are elements (minor or major, in power or in deed) of imperialism or pre-imperialism, in the Leninist sense of the word, in this or that State claiming to be part of the ICSR, particularly Russia (and no doubt the answers will have to be very different according to the 11 countries which today make up the “new BRICS”), we must consider that modern imperialism has today taken on, in its dominant form, the veritable keystone of the world capitalist-imperialist system, the maximally dangerous form of world hegemonism. As our comrade, the historian Annie Lacroix-Riz, has shown, the geopolitics of relatively watertight imperialist “spheres of influence” periodically divided between complicit and rival imperialisms (even at the cost of periodic violent confrontations) has been methodically and increasingly sabotaged and challenged by US imperialism; this hegemonic tendency has been asserted crescendo and in an increasingly cynical fashion since the beginning of the 20th century, with the two world wars and the disappearance of the U. Each time, the two world wars and the disappearance of the USSR marked new thresholds of aggression and brutal aspirations to planetary hegemony with no possibility of sharing.
This in no way means that the era of inter-imperialist conflicts is over, and that the capitalist world will henceforth be dominated by a harmonious “hyper-imperialism” such as the social-democratic theoretician Kautsky, Lenin’s opponent, once dreamt of. On the contrary, conflicts of this kind are getting worse, and we can see them emerging in an ill-concealed way between the USA and the EU under German leadership over Russian hydrocarbons. But it is precisely in order to bridge these inter-imperialist fault lines and to unite under its leadership all its European, Japanese and other vassals, whether they are satisfied or mutedly dissatisfied with its suffocating hegemony, that Uncle Sam is constantly stepping up its aggression against Russia and China. Yesterday, Washington united its Western and Japanese imperialist vassals and competitors under the banner of the anti-Soviet crusade: Today it is doing the same under the banner of the “high-intensity global conflict” that it is fomenting between the “global West” (plus Japan, Australia and South Korea) and the defensive Eurasian axis, which it senses can be supported by all the counter-hegemonic forces on the planet, with proletarian and popular forces in the lead. And this enables Washington to pull off a double coup by militarily targeting the “non-systemic” rivals Russia and China, while at the same time ruining its “intrasystemic” rivals in big German industry, which was methodically cut off from the Russian gas that supplied it at very low cost before 22 February 2022 and the economically suicidal “sanctions” imposed by the EU against Moscow under pressure from Washington.
If you have not forgotten the lessons of the materialist dialectician Mao Zedong in his essay On Contradiction, calling for a distinction to be made between the principal enemy and the secondary enemies of the moment, between the principal contradiction and the secondary contradiction, between the principal aspects and the secondary aspects of the contradiction, etc., and if you have not forgotten the lessons of the materialist dialectician Mao Zedong in his essay On Contradiction, calling for a distinction to be made between the principal enemy and the secondary enemies of the moment, between the principal contradiction and the secondary contradiction, etc, and as long as one has not disavowed, in a Trotskyist way, the recitals and conclusions of the last Congress of the Communist International (introductory report and conclusions of Georges Dimitrov to the VIIth Congress of the Comintern) which, while pointing out the imperialist character of the USA, of Britain and France at the time, nonetheless designated the fascist camp as the No. 1 enemy of the peoples, we must consider the Euro-Atlantic hegemon of world capitalism-imperialism to be the No. 1 enemy of the peoples and of peace, and consequently of all consistent Marxists.
This in no way implies idealising the counter-revolutionary regime of Putin, against which we support the Russian communists politically and ideologically, nor that of Narendra Modi (India) and the other BRICS, against whose leadership we support, if necessary and if they ask for it, our comrades of the Brazilian, Indian, South African CPs, etc. It does not imply that we are idealising the regime of the BRICS, which we support politically and ideologically.
On the contrary, we should deepen the reflection of the PRCF on the basis of the orientations defined on this point by the national conferences. For all that, there can be no question of summarily relegating the PRC to the rank of “imperialist country”, as some Party leaders are urging us to do. How can we ignore the fact that in China it is a party claiming to be inspired by Marx and Mao—the CCP—which sets the general direction, that the strategic sectors of the economy have remained public in the PRC, that the CCP intervenes in every company, including foreign ones, and that the wages and social benefits sacrificed at the time of the neo-liberal “reforms” of the 2000s have been increased or (partially) restored? And how can we forget that the CCP is undoubtedly the only political force in China capable of guaranteeing the country’s territorial unity, capacity for military resistance and socio-political stability in the face of the subversive ventures of Western imperialism (Hong Kong, Tibet, Sinkiang, etc.). Similarly, it would be hasty, to say the least, to equate China’s “Belt and Road” initiative, supported by over 100 countries in the East and South, with a classic imperialist enterprise. On the contrary, many countries in the South see it as an effective means of catching up technically and scientifically, and even as an alternative to the neo-colonial plundering traditionally practised by the former colonial empires and their noxious institutions (IMF, CFA franc, WTO, etc.). It should also be noted that China’s political and commercial relations are adapted to the languages and customs of its economic partners (e.g. China insists on speaking French to French-speaking Africa, something that “French” CAC companies working in Africa almost no longer do). CAC40 companies working in Africa!) while refraining from interfering in the affairs of its partner states, and even less from periodically provoking coups d’état, or even outright counter-revolutionary putsches (Burkina Faso, overthrow and assassination of Sankara).
This is why, while reaffirming its great respect for the KKE, for its combative struggles in Greece and for its great anti-fascist history, the PRCF can only reiterate its disagreement with the geopolitical analysis of this party, which pits Euro-Atlanticist imperialism-hegemonism against the countries, large and small, which it attacks at every opportunity from one end of the planet to the other. This kind of political amalgam can only blunt the revolutionary defeatism of Western anti-imperialist organisations; it also encourages a too comfortable “ni-ni” attitude which opens the door to the unbridled Russophobia and Sinophobia of the Western imperialists and even leads them to consider the “resistance” of the pro-Nazi regime in Kiev as partially “legitimate”.
Moreover, there is no opposition in principle between, on the one hand, the building of broad fronts against hegemonism and imperialism and, on the other hand, the indispensable conquest by communist parties of a leading role in the anti-imperialist struggle and, a fortiori, in the anti-capitalist struggle. More than ever, the anti-imperialist struggle, complemented by the counter-hegemonic struggle, is ultimately linked to the battle to emerge from capitalism, which can only be waged by the international proletariat led by communist parties faithful to Leninism. There is no choice between the reaffirmation of the proletarian and Leninist identity of the communist parties and their presence, as offensive as possible, at the head of broad fronts, whether international or internal to one country or another; because a consistent struggle against imperialism, with communist parties firmly anchored to the proletariat at the head of the anti-imperialist fronts, would obviously be the best way to reopen the road to socialism-communism for humanity, as we saw in particular in the years following the victory of the anti-Hitler Coalition led by the USSR Neither ruinous isolation, signifying the certain defeat of the proletariat and leading to a semi-complacent attitude towards Zelensky’s Banderist regime, nor alignment of the national CPs and the International Communist Movement (ICM) with bourgeois forces or with the Soviet Union.) with bourgeois or petty-bourgeois forces active in existing anti-imperialist fronts, but offensive intervention by communist parties to build such fronts, to direct them towards final victory and thus to put the working class, country by country and internationally, in the best possible conditions to achieve socialist revolution with the broadest possible support, not only of wage-earners, but of all the popular and non-oligarchic strata.
Finally, we must not forget that, as the future founders of the PRCF were already explaining on the eve of the “Euromissile crisis” of 1984, exterminism is asserting itself as a central dimension of imperialist capitalism. The capitalist mode of production has long since become obsolete, so that its increasingly violent and artificial maintenance can only expose humanity to growing risks to its survival on military, environmental, civilisational and other levels. This does not imply any historical pessimism (“declinism” or “collapse”!), but rather an increased commitment to unite around the proletariat all the forces that want to preserve life and make the “common happiness” dreamed of by Babeuf the “goal of society”. At a time when humanity now numbers more than eight billion people, the relative majority of whom are young people, Paul Vaillant-Couturier’s words “Communism is the youth of the world” and Fidel Castro’s declaration “Socialism or death, free country(ies) or death, we shall overcome” are resonating ever more strongly.
IV. WHAT CAN BE DONE TO DEFEND PEACE AND TO RESTORE THE PERSPECTIVE OF A COMMUNIST FUTURE FOR HUMANITY?
- Methodically link peaceful, anti-imperialist and counter-hegemonic struggles to social struggles—Macron and his police ministers would like to divert the attention of the masses, many of whom are already starving, who have had a very unpopular pension cut imposed on them and who no longer “recognise” the legitimacy of the regime; in order to create a diversion, the authorities are separating international issues from “internal” social issues and are stigmatising, or even attempting to repress, those forces which refuse, more or less, sometimes in an ill-targeted or inappropriate manner, to “stand down”. On the contrary, we need to help workers to closely link the commitment to world peace and the struggle for the sovereignty of peoples with the social struggle for wages, jobs, social gains, public services, production in France and democratic freedoms. This is all the more necessary because the EU serves as a European pivot for the external aggressions of NATO, for the arms race in France and Europe, and even within our own country, for the decline in wages, pensions and unemployment benefits, as well as for transcontinental capitalist mergers and the progressive crushing of social protection, pensions and public services.
- In every anti-imperialist action, we must stress the unity of anti-imperialism, anti-fascism, popular patriotism and social counter-offensives. The same capitalist logic drives anti-social attacks, the destruction of national dignity, the Euro-fascistization of the country boosted by anti-communist negationism and the march towards high-intensity conflict described above;
- On the Middle East, we must reaffirm our fundamental positions: without in the least flirting with the reactionary sectors which take advantage of the Israeli-Arab conflict to reactivate anti-Semitism, and no more with the racists and other xenophobes who use it symmetrically to stigmatise “Muslims” no less globally and odiously, nor ideologically supporting the fundamentalist positions of whatever religious community they emanate from (it must be said that we remain fundamentally secular militants, as has always been the OLP), we nonetheless reject any kind of comfortably “ni-nist” line drawing an equal sign between Israel’s structurally colonial policy (and this is all the more true in the case of the fascist exterminator Netanyahu) and the resistance of the Palestinian people, denied and crushed under the bombs, if not threatened with massive ethnic cleansing, if not outright genocide. The right of the Palestinian people to resist is no more legally, politically or morally debatable than the right of the French people to resist as they did, notably through the armed resistance of the FTPF and the FTP-MOI, during the Second World War!
For the time being, therefore, we demand loud and clear the right of Palestinians and Israelis to have their own fully-fledged state, as required by UN resolutions and the Oslo Accords signed by Israel and the PLO. These agreements have since been violated unilaterally by Israel, which has even stepped up its illegal colonisation and ethnic cleansing of Palestinian land, while organising an apartheid policy characterised by the daily humiliation of the Palestinians. However, the immediate diplomatic solution known as the “two-state solution” in no way precludes the possibility of considering, in the long term, when the current terrible tensions have subsided to some extent and insofar as, of course, the inhabitants of all religions in this region have freely debated and decided, a single democratic, secular and social state, clearly separated from any religion, in which the Hebrew-speaking and Arabic-speaking citizens of the region, whether Arabs, Jews, Christians or free thinkers, could finally build their future together. But it is up to the inhabitants of the two states in this region to decide this in a spirit of mutual respect, a requirement that Tel Aviv’s colonial policy has deliberately torpedoed and compromised. - As far as the Donbass is concerned, we affirm the right of its working-class, Russian-speaking population, historically attached to the USSR and Soviet Russia, to free itself from the Russophobic, pro-Nazi regime in Kiev and join the Russian Federation, just as the people of Crimea, by an overwhelming majority, wanted to do before them. Without ideologically endorsing the anti-communist Putin, and while firmly supporting, in Russia as in Ukraine, the courageous communist parties of these countries, we believe that the responsibility for the current war lies entirely with Washington, the EU and NATO. The latter have done everything in their power to set the former socialist countries of Europe, as well as the Baltic republics, Georgia, Ukraine, etc., against Moscow, with the aim of exerting military pressure on Russia, even if it has officially become anti-communist, to recolonise it as in Yeltsin’s time, to separate it from China and, when the time comes, to carve it up territorially, as certain influential circles in the USA are already planning to do very publicly. Both have publicly boasted that they used the Minsk Agreements, guaranteed by Berlin and Paris, as a diplomatic decoy to allow Kiev to continue arming itself while preparing a military offensive against Moscow. The least we can ask in this matter is that official France, whatever the displeasure of the ‘socialist’, ‘ecologist’ and ‘communist’ MPs who shamefully voted for the delivery of French heavy weapons to Kiev, should finally campaign for de-escalation and assist diplomatic efforts (e.g. the Chinese peace plan) to prevent a possible catastrophe of global proportions by demanding the resumption of East-West and North-South dialogue.
- With regard to China, the PRCF condemns any challenge to China’s territorial unity, whether in Sinkiang, Tibet or Hong Kong, where the anti-Chinese and anti-communist disinformation campaigns of the media under influence must be denounced. Whether in the Taiwan Strait or in the China Sea, the French Navy must stop acting as the U.S. Navy’s deputy, even though our country has never had the slightest coercive influence on China. Whether in the Taiwan Strait or in the China Sea, the French navy must stop acting as the US Navy’s deputy, even though our country has never had the slightest national dispute with China!
- In the Far East, the PRCF supports the efforts of the DPR of Korea for the peaceful reunification of the Peninsula on the basis of the principle of “One country, two systems”; the only prerequisite for this patriotic and peaceful reunification of the Korean people is the unconditional departure of the American armada from the South of the country.
- The PRCF condemns the massive rearmament of Japan, just as it castigates the return of German militarism to Europe through this revenge on Stalingrad and on the Yugoslav communist partisans of 1940-1945: on the one hand, the massive dispatch of German arms to Kiev to “liberate” the Ukraine (!), and on the other, the provocative presence of German soldiers in certain parts of ex-Yugoslavia dismembered by NATO, and even the encouragement given by the EU-NATO to the mafia-like rulers of Kosovo to try to provoke a new war against the Serbs in the north of Kosovo.
- The PRCF is also fighting against Berlin’s pretensions (half-heartedly “accompanied” by Macron!) to seize France’s permanent seat on the UN Security Council and to use the French “nuclear umbrella” to cover the entire territory of the EU. Such a renunciation of the French doctrine on the use of nuclear weapons would expose our country to insane risks, including the possibility of its immediate disappearance in the event of a major European conflict.
In the same spirit, we must denounce the strengthening of German hegemony over Europe through the totally undemocratic establishment of the so-called “European federal state” called for by Scholz and applauded in advance by Washington. This is what is meant by the march towards a “United States of Europe” being promoted by the Macronist and L.R. MPs with the support of the false Euro-Atlanticist left, in particular the Greens. - Support the anti-capitalist, anti-fascist and anti-imperialist WFTU and denounce more strongly the yellow syndicalism of the ITUC, the ETUC. and the apparatchiks of the French confederations who relay them. The Euro-Atlantic oligarchies, led by MEDEF and CAC40, must have “trade union” intermediaries at the head of the Euro-formatted trade union confederations, which are comfortably ensconced in capitalist society, if they are to succeed in their criminal plans against the workers, but also against sovereign nations and world peace. Heir to the anti-Soviet cold war and notoriously financed originally by the CIA, the CSI is entirely devoted to capital/labour class collaboration, which serves to “set to music” the Maastricht counter-reforms and the ideological-military campaigns of imperialism. The same is true of the ETUC, that “trade union” transmission belt totally subservient to the Brussels Commission. Recently chaired by Laurent Berger, the former leader of the CFDT who has just led French workers to a resounding defeat, the ETUC is also campaigning for escalation in Ukraine. In the face of this attempt to turn the world of work upside down, frankly communist activists are campaigning loud and clear for determined support for the World Federation of Trade Unions which, when the CGT was affiliated to it, contributed internationally to the greatest social and democratic advances of the post-war period in France.
- For the revival of a frankly communist, anti-imperialist and Marxist-Leninist International Communist Movement—It is a pity that, in the midst of capitalist globalisation, the communists who, with Marx, invented the modern concept of internationalism, still do not have a real fighting ICM, and even less a Communist International, which was dissolved in 1943 without any long-term assessment of this dissolution having been drawn up collectively by the parties which emerged from the Comintern. A rigorous international discussion on this assessment, and above all on the future of communist internationalism, cannot be avoided for much longer, otherwise the battle hymn of all the world’s communists will be emptied of all effective content.
The PRCF will therefore support, as it has always done, any effort aimed at the rebirth of a fighting ICM, which is all the more necessary now that, in our era of capitalist globalisation, any major proletarian struggle necessarily has a strong international dimension, at least implicitly. Recent experience shows that the ICM must not attempt to reconstitute itself on the basis of a predefined line imposed by this or that party proclaiming itself to be the guide of the internationalist renaissance without even having carried out the socialist revolution at home; for reasons of principle and effectiveness, this reconstitution should take place on the basis, for each national communist party, of the search for a deep proletarian and popular roots, of the continuous anti-imperialist action of all communist parties, of their common defence of revolutionary memory against historical negationism, their shared commitment to the defence of Marxism-Leninism and against all right-wing and “left-wing” variants of revisionism and dogmatism, a constant effort to develop together a common Marxist-Leninist analysis of the major contemporary problems, the dialectical articulation of the struggles for social emancipation and the struggles for national emancipation in such a way as to bring to life in the present day the Comintern motto “Proletarians of all countries, oppressed peoples of the world, unite!”. This would mean not only issuing, from time to time, commendable “joint declarations” with little follow-up in terms of action, but conducting genuine joint international communist campaigns, for example on the following points, which come under the heading of what we propose to call the practical work of international communist revival: - unwavering political solidarity with socialist Cuba and with the countries of the ALBA which are linked to it which are linked to it ;
- internationalist class solidarity with the persecuted CPs and class trade unions in Europe and throughout the world
- the defence of communist and revolutionary memory slandered by historical negationism which takes advantage of this to rehabilitate fascism. This requires regular joint campaigns on dates emblematic of historical communism (Paris Commune, October 1917, Stalingrad, etc.).
- resolute support for the Palestinian people and other peoples confronting imperialism and its creatures
- resolute common struggle against the EU, NATO and the other institutions of capitalist globalisation under Euro-Atlantic hegemony.
In order to reconstitute the ICM on a combative basis, and to put an end to its current virtual paralysis, aggravated by the unilateral dissolution of the “European Initiative of CPs” by one party, it is urgently necessary, on the basis of a simple historical routine which has become obsolete, to no longer accommodate in this Movement the parties which have wrecked the socialist camp, and/or which continue to torpedo international communism, whether initially by following Gorbachev or “eurocommunism”, nor of course the Trotskyist movements which, from time immemorial, have fought real socialism while cultivating a sterile leftism. In particular, it is counter-productive to continue to welcome into the ICM parties affiliated to the European Left Party, that EU-subsidized social-democratic officine whose sole function is to tie down the working class to a Euro-Atlanticist “construction” harmful to peoples and world peace.
Finally, a “Fifth International” devoid of class contours and precise doctrinal delimitation and mixing communist parties with bourgeois or petty-bourgeois patriotic parties cannot be considered a legitimate avatar of the Leninist Communist International. This confused way of proceeding would lead to the dissolution of the existing CPs into a non-proletarian conglomerate, whereas all peoples need communist parties, and also a fully independent ICM, not only to achieve social revolution, but to lead the anti-imperialist struggle to victory. This way of operating would be no less counter-productive from the point of view of bringing anti-imperialists together, because confusing the anti-imperialist regroupment with the regroupment of Communist and Workers’ Parties can only atrophy the perimeter of the necessary anti-imperialist regroupment while aggravating the ideological confusion in the Marxist ranks.
Conclusion
More than ever, communists must combine the effort to reconstitute, wherever they do not yet exist, Leninist parties linked to the workers, and the work aimed at bringing together anti-oligarchic, anti-monopolist and counter-hegemonic forces, while respecting the specific characteristics of each of the levels of intervention considered. The PRCF, which, following the work of its international commissions over several decades, corresponds abroad with more than a hundred communist parties and organisations, will deepen this work by linking it closely to the work of rebuilding the communist party in France: for the greatest service that the PRCF can render today to the ICM is to contribute with all its forces, still modest admittedly, but dynamic, to the rebirth of a great fighting communist party in France itself.
