Gianni Pierini | Risorgere (Italy)
Good morning, comrades.
On behalf of our organization, Risorgere, I would like to thank you for organizing this Eleventh International Conference of the World Anti-Imperialist Platform and for giving us the opportunity to participate.
We come from Italy, a country that belongs to the collective West, which, in the name of the interests of a handful of financiers, speculators, and even pedophiles, has declared war on the rest of the world, threatening the very existence of Humanity and which, if it could, would not hesitate to drag all of humanity into the grave with it.
Like most other European states, Italy lives in a condition of profound subordination to the imperialist center. Since the late 1940s, with the creation of NATO and the beginning of the European federalist process, our country has been progressively deprived of any real national sovereignty. Our institutions, our armed forces, the judiciary, the police, the media, academia, and the cultural sphere have all been thoroughly infiltrated by agents of imperialism, who have pursued the interests of the regime in Washington and its servants in Brussels and Tel Aviv at the expense of the interests of the Italian working masses.
The result of this process is plain for all to see: a deindustrialized country, incapable of guaranteeing its inhabitants a dignified existence or any meaningful prospect for the future. A tiny circle of major bourgeois speculators has amassed immense fortunes through privatizations—the largest carried out anywhere in Europe—and through Italy’s subordinate integration into the American hegemonic system as genuine compradors. At the same time, the Italian popular masses have seen their social rights and access to essential public services drastically reduced, while unemployment, emigration, and material and moral decline have spread throughout the country.
Italy, like the other PIGS countries of Southern Europe—Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain—has paid the highest price for European integration. To the predatory mechanisms of the US dollar and the Washington Consensus have been added those of the European Commission, the euro, and the European Central Bank. The wealth produced by the labor of entire generations of Italians has been plundered in the name of austerity, with the consent of both the political right and the liberal left. The most disgraceful and painful aspect of the condition in which our country finds itself is not, however, economic plunder. Hundreds of millions of human beings have lived under imperialist domination and witnessed their nations stripped of their wealth, yet they preserved their dignity and resisted the oppressor alongside the other peoples of the world. What humiliates us most is seeing Italians compelled to support imperialism with their weapons or with their resources.
This pains us even more when we think of the colonial past of monarchical Italy, whose governments engaged in shameful, criminal, and pointless wars of conquest. This feeling grows even stronger when we remember those generations of Italians who, in the struggle for the unification of our country, for the defense of its independence, and later in the fight against fascism, gave their lives while embodying very different principles and displaying far greater dignity.
Thousands of Italian soldiers have been deployed as Euro-American colonial troops in numerous theaters of war, tasked with “stabilizing” countries devastated by NATO aggression. Military bases on Italian soil made possible the bombings of Serbia and Libya. From bases located in Italy, particularly in Sicily, drones are launched that assist the Kiev regime in its terrorist activities against the Russian population of Crimea. Italian weapons arm Ukrainian extremists responsible for war crimes, while Italian made components have been found in the drones that killed twenty-one students in Starobelsk.
The Italian government has supported every initiative of American imperialism, reaching levels of subordination unknown even during the Cold War. “Our” government has supported the war launched against the Russian Federation, the attacks on Iran, the genocide committed in Gaza, the aggressive maneuvers in the Asia-Pacific against the People’s Republic of China, the kidnapping of President Maduro, and the economic strangulation of Cuba.
We Italians do not live under bombardment, and we still enjoy a degree of prosperity denied to many countries of the Global South. Nevertheless, we believe that there is no future for Italy within the West. Indeed, because of our historical experience, our cultural heritage, and the imprint of our Latin and Roman Catholic civilization, we feel closer to the peoples of the Global South.
Our true allies are not the Euro-American “democracies,” but rather the peoples of the world who are fighting against imperialism and the international working class that is building, day by day, the emerging reality of socialism.
We want to play our part in the struggle that pits Humanity against the forces of imperialism, in order to win the right to live in a free country and to redeem decades of humiliation.
National independence and support for the process of building a multipolar world and a community with a shared future for humanity represent, for us, the two inseparable elements of any genuinely anti-imperialist struggle. While the compatible left and Western “Marxists” obsessively repeat the falsehood of “competing imperialisms,” refusing to support those who are fighting for the liberation of Humanity, communists recognize in the multipolar transformation of the world a great manifestation of class struggle.
Multipolarity is class struggle.
On one side stands the monopolistic financial bourgeoisie embodied by Washington’s hegemony and its clients; on the other stand the international working class and those sectors of the national bourgeoisie that possess both the interest and the courage to oppose the current international hierarchy.
There is no “competition between imperialisms.” The big bourgeoisie of every country does not dream of building its own empire; it dreams of placing itself at the service of American capital, trading its autonomy for the guarantee of privileged rents. From this class, and from its political representatives on both the right and the left, we can expect nothing. As Stalin stated in 1952, the bourgeoisie has abandoned the banner of national independence, and only the communists can take it up and raise it once again.
Communists have a duty to stand at the forefront of the struggle for a multipolar world, because the consolidation of that world depends on the success of this struggle. Wherever the bourgeoisie remains in power, capitulation to the forces of imperialism is only a matter of time. Only communists have demonstrated the ability to oppose imperialism in a coherent, conscious, and effective manner.
It is therefore our task to wage an open and determined struggle against imperialism in those countries subjected to imperialist occupation. We must support, without hesitation, all existing socialist states and, above all, the People’s Republic of China led by Comrade Xi Jinping and guided by his Thought, representing a new level in the development of Marxism. At the same time, we must sincerely support all progressive and revolutionary forces that express the interests of working people in countries which, although not socialist, courageously oppose imperialism.
Closer cooperation among anti-imperialist forces is necessary, both among states and among political and social organizations. A common struggle against the forces of the “compatible left,” which support imperialism directly or indirectly, is necessary. We must pool our strengths, our experiences, and our capacities in order to confront the common enemy of Humanity with a united front of workers, revolutionaries, and communists determined to overthrow it and finally build a new world.
Although most of us are not on the battlefields today, we must nevertheless regard. Ourselves as participants in the ongoing conflict.
We are at war, and each of us must fight on our own front to the best of our abilities.
This is the duty of communists, the vanguard of the working class and of Humanity as a whole.
Only through unity and international solidarity will we achieve victory.
Thank you.
