Madrid October 2011
The Plenary Session of the International Conference of Marxist-Leninist Parties and Organizations (ICMLPO) was successfully held in Madrid with the participation of almost all the member parties and organizations from Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia.
Throughout the sessions, and after reviewing the work of the parties in their respective countries, the Plenary took note of the inability of capital to resolve the general crisis with the various methods that it has used so far.
Unemployment and misery are affecting millions of workers, and particularly young people and women, both in the main imperialist economies as well as in the dependent countries. The neoliberal programs and policies have not resolved the great difficulties of the system much less the situation of the working class and the peoples.
New sectors of the workers and popular masses are joining the struggle for their rights: the youth, public employees, the unemployed, immigrants are defending the gains won through decades of combat and are trying out new forms of struggle and unity; they are learning precious lessons that raise the level of consciousness of the broad masses and are putting forward objectives of greater significance against capitalism; the advanced sectors are looking at the objectives of socialism.
The idea that the weight of the crisis should fall on the class that has caused it and not on its victims is already a widely shared objective, even an outcry. In Europe, the U.S. and Latin America, the workers are confronting the policies of privatization, cutbacks in social services and plundering; in sub-Sahara Africa, the peoples are resisting being made the battlefield of the imperialist looters; in Asia the workers are carrying out great strike movements and are heroically resisting the imperialist military occupation.
The struggle of the Arab peoples is of particular importance. The workers, youth and women brought down the hated tyrannies allied with imperialism in combative and massive demonstrations, as happened in Tunisia and Egypt; they ignited the flames of combative actions of the working masses in other countries in the region such as Bahrain, Yemen, Jordan, Morocco, Algeria, etc.
We emphasize the role of the Communist Party of the Workers of Tunisia (PCOT) in the development of the political revolution as well as in the continuation of the struggle to overthrow capitalism and to transform the social and economic structures of the country. In that process, the PCOT is fulfilling its historical responsibilities and showing itself as a revolutionary political reference point.
We decisively condemn the armed imperialist intervention (of France, Great Britain, U.S. and NATO) against Libya, which has caused the devastation of the country and the slaughter of more than 50,000 civilians. They have tried to justify the imperialist aggression as the “defense of freedom and the democracy for the Libyans,” when in fact it is to bring about a redistribution of Libya’s oil and water resources, as well as to smother the yearning for freedom of all the Arab peoples by blood and fire. That is why the imperialist powers attacked and defeated their former ally Gaddafi, but they could not drown the resistance and the fight for freedom of the Libyan people that will develop.
The imperialist countries headed by the U.S. are planning to carry out military aggression in Syria and from there they are aiming at Iran. Once again they are using the just aspirations and struggle of the workers and youth to win democracy and freedom. We the workers, peoples and youth as well as revolutionaries and communists reject those disastrous intensions. We proclaim the right of the peoples to self-determination. The destiny of Syria must be resolved by the Syrian workers and youth.
The imperialist war that is devastating Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya even though it causes great atrocities and suffering for the peoples is turning into a quagmire for the occupying military forces, which are receiving serious blows inflicted by the heroic resistance. We condemn the imperialist military aggression and we firmly support the struggle against the occupation.
We defend the right to self-determination of the Palestinian people, their heroic fight against imperialism and Zionism as well as their right to be recognized as a State by the United Nations.
The noose of the foreign debt continues to tighten against the development of the dependent countries and the situation of the working masses. The huge debt is now affecting the U.S. itself, which recently raised the debt ceiling imposed by its own legislation. Its inability to pay was resolved temporarily with the “legal” extension of the debt ceiling at the cost of cutbacks to wages, pensions, health care and education, as well as other public services; those measures are turning against the capitalists themselves because they expand the recession to an international scale.
In Greece they are trying to resolve the bankruptcy by making the workers pay an opprobrious foreign debt that is growing enormously under the guise of aid. It is an unjust and illegitimate foreign debt, the workers did not contract it and it has been paid many times over. For that reason in all regions of the world we workers, peoples and revolutionaries are vigorously raising the slogan of nonpayment of the debt.
Our parties and organizations of the ICMLPO, other political and mass organizations are raising in a determined manner an international campaign for the cancellation of Tunisia’s foreign debt.
The development of the struggle of the workers and peoples, the resistance to the effects of the crisis, the demands for freedom and democracy that are developing, at a different level, in all countries, are returning the protagonism and leading role to the working class, which is showing most severely the contradiction between capital and labor. The rest of the popular sectors (students, women, unemployed, users of public goods and services, etc.) are grouping themselves around the working class; they are becoming unified and speaking out against the aggression of imperialism and the exploitation of capitalism.
The discrediting of the bourgeois institutions and the union bureaucracies, but above all the struggle of the working class, is contributing to unmasking the true nature of bourgeois democracy and the capitalist institutions as well as its servants, the opportunists and revisionists. In these circumstances appreciable sectors of the working class, the peoples and the youth are looking for alternatives roads.
It is up to us proletarian revolutionaries to play a more dynamic role: to denounce the nature of the oppression and exploitation, to clarify the class nature of the conflicts, the traitorous role of the union bureaucracy, the labor aristocracy, the diversionary action of opportunism and, mainly, to fight for the leadership of the organization and the struggles of the working masses and youth.
In this process it is indispensable to push forward class-struggle trade unionism, the unity of the workers and union movement, unity in action and in programmatic proposals. Within the working class and its fights we must work for the unity of the popular movement, for the incorporation of the peasant masses, the youth and the oppressed peoples and nationalities. We must combat capitalism and imperialism in a single front, with clenched fists; we must raise the banner of socialism.
The workers and popular movement are confronting the challenge of the fight against the domination of imperialism and capitalism, for freedom and democracy, as well as the determination to demarcate positions between the revolution and reformism.
The conditions for the revolutionary struggle of the workers and peoples are favorable and tomorrow they will be better. The present situation makes the necessity of the social revolution more evident and the important social and political events show the possibility of organizing it. Our parties and organizations reaffirm their decision to organize and make the revolution.
In reaffirming ourselves on the basis of proletarian internationalism we express our fighting solidarity with the workers and peoples who are struggling all over the world.
Workers of the world, unite!
Albania (Communist Party)
Brazil (Revolutionary Communist Party)
Burkina Faso (Revolutionary Communist Party of Volta)
Denmark (Communist Party of the Workers – APK)
Dominican Republic (Communist Party of Labor)
Ecuador (Marxist-Leninist Communist Party)
France (Communist Party of the Workers – PCOF)
Germany (Organization for the Reconstruction of the Communist Party – Arbeit Zukunft)
Greece (Organization for the Reconstruction of the Communist Party – 1918-1955)
Iran (Party of Labor – PLI – Toufan)
Italy (Communist Platform)
México (Communist Party – ML)
Morocco (Democratic Way)
Spain (Communist Party M-L)
Tunisia (Communist Party of the Workers PCOT)
Turkey (Revolutionary Communist Party – TDKP)
Venezuela (Marxist-Leninist Communist Party
The International Conference of Marxist-Leninist Parties and Organisations
