Sergei Mikhailov | DPRK International Youth Friendship League (Russia)
Dear comrades, founders of the World Anti-Imperialist Workers’ Platform,
I stand before you not only as a member of the DPRK International Solidarity Group, but also as a worker and as someone who believes that the anti-imperialism movement requires both broad support and active participation of the working class.
Today, we build a platform for those who produce the world—and who are the first to be crushed when imperialism strikes.
Why a Workers’ Platform? Because imperialist forces bomb factories, sanction healthcare and other crucial services, and then tell the oppressed to be grateful for charity. Modern situation, when trade union bureaucrats shake hands with ambassadors while workers starve, demands a new approach to our struggle. But to build, we must first learn—and learn correctly.
A Workers’s Platform requires honesty, not diplomacy, so let me be direct with you, comrades. For twenty years, the Bolivarian movement spoke of socialism. But what did oil workers actually control? They controlled the machinery, yes—but not the decisions. PDVSA became a bureaucratized enterprise where managers enriched themselves while workers received handouts. When the oil price crashed in 2015, workers could not restart production—because they had never been given the power to plan, to allocate, to decide. As a result, the Venezuelan working class became mere spectators. When Maduro got captured, there were no factory occupations, no militia roadblocks, no general strike. Just silence. Why? Because paternalism is not class consciousness.
Cuba’s revolution gave us literacy and healthcare—real achievements. But the Cuban trade union movement became a transmission belt for state policy, not an organ of working-class self-activity. The dual economy—dollar tourism versus peso labor—created a labor aristocracy in some sectors and precarious workers in others. A trade union that cannot criticize, cannot strike, and cannot organize horizontally is not a union—it is a department of management. And management does not make revolution.
Furthermore, without theory, workers are disarmed. Imperialism trains its own cadres in economics, law, and military strategy. We must train ours in something stronger: the science of class struggle. While Marxist theory of value, surplus extraction, crisis of capitalism explains why imperialism exists materially, Leninism explains how the system reproduces itself both economically and politically. Juche as the most advanced idea of the working class tells how a small, besieged nation can organize workers, peasants, soldiers and intellectuals to survive and develop under the principles of self-reliance and people as the masters.
But theory alone is not enough. We must also study modern experience from both socialist-oriented and capitalist countries. We clearly see that the path of arduous struggle, selfless devotion to securing a sovereign homeland and consistent push towards people’s power, is the most successful way of socialist construction.
The DPRK has endured immense hardship due to sanctions, forced isolation, and the collapse of its former trading partners. The Arduous March of the 1990s was a catastrophe for Korean workers. However, they did not abandon socialism when it was most vulnerable, with food running out and external situation being grim. They tightened their determination, trusted their party, and rebuilt. That is not blind loyalty—that is class consciousness forged in fire. The lesson for us: when sanctions hit, when inflation kills wages, when the empire tightens its grip—do we beg for IMF loans, or do we reorganize production ourselves? The DPRK chose the second path.
That is why it still exists and, in its own way, thrives.
My proposal to our founding conference is as follows: commit to achieving necessary conditions and building ties so that workers from around the world can exchange ideas and experience in organizing and overcoming imperialist pressure. For example, a delegation of electricians from Cuba may visit a power plant in the DPRK, or a Turkish miner visits a Cuban nickel plant. This way workers can learn from practice, see the machines, forge unity.
Comrades, the empire is not sleeping. It is rearming, reorganizing, and retraining its cadres. If we do not do the same, we will be crushed one by one—Cuba, Venezuela, Korea—all of them. But we have something imperialism does not: the power to stop production, to organize horizontally, to build a world without bosses and without borders.
