Intervention of the New Communist Party of the Netherlands by Wil van der Klift

Dear Comrades,

I like to express the happiness and respect of our party for the Greek comrades, who are celebrating the 80th anniversary of their party. So many parties were less successful! I wish to congratulate everybody present that our Greek comrades were so successful, because now they are capable of organizing a meeting like this one. I thank the leadership of the party for inviting us to this very important meeting.

I want to continue my speech by congratulating the Indonesian people with their first step towards more democracy. Although it's a step towards parliamentary democracy, it is a very important one. It will take many steps to get a socialist democracy, but the people if Indonesia now have shown their force. Maybe the ruling class of Indonesia, supported by the IMF and other US-financial powers, will not give up their positions immediately or without armed resistance, but the first victory is there:

Suharto had to give up power! Only a few people were expecting this a few years ago. At that time everybody was speaking about the so-called Asian Tigers. And then - more or less suddenly - this Tigers became helpless pussycats. For those people who studied the Communist Manifesto it came not as a surprise. Many things changed in this period of a 150 years, but the message still is valuable. For communist parties the main points of the analysis and the main direction of the solutions is still correct and worth to study carefully. So indeed let's get back the Communist Manifesto into the house of every worker!

In our country the Social Democrats of the new type are ruling, together with the Liberals. The result is that the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer. They are defending this situation by telling everybody that they created new employment. But if you take a good look at this new jobs, you will see that they are mostly part-time and badly paid. And for the young people jobs without social security and without the possibility to build up a pension. And moreover they are lying. Officially they speak about 5,7 percent unemployment, but in reality it is above 20 percent. This government is taking the money from the working class - directly and indirectly - and is giving it to the transnational enterprises, to the banks and to a small group of the working class that is capable of finding ways to earn money in bussines and by making profits by speculating. While the amount of people that are getting less money, less social services and less security in the future is growing rapidly.

Privatization of welfare agreements are becoming normal in our country. So nobody is safe in the future and more and more people are falling into poverty already today. This is modern Social Democracy. Last year we had six strikes in the Netherlands and non of them was an initiative of the trade unions. In our country trade unions are helping the ruling class to convince the workers of the necessity of class-peace and lowering the wages.

But still the majority of the working class is believing the stories of the ruling class. Because of the relative good position of a large part of the working class in our country, opportunist left groups were formed, like Green Left (Groen Links) and the Socialist Party(Socialistische Party/SP). But they are misleading the victims of the capitalist rulers. They don't speak about the necessity of class-struggle. They don't speak about the necessity of socialism anymore. They are organizing the feelings of resistance of a growing part of the people in a wrong way, by offering the working class easy solutions. They are furthermore trying to tell the working class that a parliamentary solution can change the negative developments.

We - the NCPN - have to fight not only our class-enemy but also this false ideas, this false solutions. We have to fight opportunism and revisionism as well as organize the working class to fight against the growing capitalist plunder!

So our main concern is how to build up a communist party that has a strong mass base, but also a strong ideological base. Already one year ago, we - the Dutch communists - could have celebrated the founding of our party 80 years ago!! But the former leaders of the CPN gave up the fight for socialism about 15 years ago and the CPN was barried ten years ago. A strong mass-party died. Why? Because the ideological base was not strong enough, so opportunism, parliamentarism and revisionism could kill the party. This is a very important lesson for the communists of our country: without a strong ideological base every communist party, now or in the future, will die! This is one of the important lessons we have learned.

We also learned that the only way to enhance the ideological level in the party is to study Marxism-Leninism very carefully. And secondly we are very sure that only international unification and international discussion will give us the right answers on the many problems we have to solve yet. There has to be found an international communist answer and international communist unity to fight our common class-enemy in this globalized world. We need to know the experiences and knowledge of all communist parties.

"Proletarians of all countries unite" is as important as it was 50 years ago!

But of course there will not be any proletarian internationalism without national class-struggle. So this is the second question we have to solve in the Netherlands: how to build up the new CP and how to build a mass-party, based on marxist-leninist ideology.

Comrades, at the moment the first priority of the leadership of our party is how to get more ideological unity in our party. Because we think that we can not grow and become a mass-party without a solid ideological unity in our party. Therefore we are very much interested in the experiences of other communist, socialist and workers parties in finding new ways to strengthen the international communist movement. That's why we are so glad to be here. I think our party will agree with the proposals of the Greek Communist Party, as comrade Aleka Papariga suggested in her speech. But I am sure our party wants to defend the Peoples Republic of Korea as well as Cuba.

Thank you for listening, thank you for the other interventions, because: only together, only united we will win! The world is becoming one battle­field more and more everyday.
So long live Proletarian Internationalism, long live Marxism-Leninism, long live Socialism!