Dear comrades,
In the name of PADS, I would like to convey warm thanks to the Greek comrades for having
organised this meeting, and greetings to the comrades from all fraternal parties present
today.
After the collapse of the socialist system, the imperialist countries stepped up the wave of offensives against the working class and the peoples all over the world.
The bourgeois class, and particularly the bourgeois class of the monopolies, intends to take advantage of the correlation of forces that emerged from the temporary defeat of socialism and to snatch away from the working people the social and democratic gains they had taken decades to win. It also plans to impose a new form of colonialism on the peoples who are trying to integrate their political and economic independence, to build a modern economy based on industrialisation and to regain control over their natural resources which foreign capitalist companies had usurped.
Within the framework of this offensive, the imperialist forces accompany their pressures with an ideological bombardment of unprecedented scope in an attempt to make the peoples believe that their efforts to build a modern economy in the service of their own national interests were derived from a utopian view contrary to the so-called natural economic tendencies of the market economy and globalisation.
The imperialist bourgeois classes do not hesitate to offer their support to the most reactionary, the most bloodthirsty forces, the forces considered to be the most capable of imposing the stability necessary for capitalist super-exploitation, the plundering of these peoples’ resources, and the free movement of capital according to their own vested interests.
In many countries, we have seen confirmed in a tangible way the Leninist position that imperialism is the stage in which the bourgeois class becomes reactionary in all senses of the word.
The bourgeois class of the monopolies encourages and gives active support to actions by the forces of obscurantism, religious fanaticism, fascism with a «local colour», autonomies movements, and irrationalism, in order to suppress the struggles of the working people and of working class strata to improve their financial and political situation. In this way it seeks to isolate or even to crush the communists and progressive currents that are striving to orient or to lead these struggles.
Contrary to what the imperialist bourgeois class encourages people to believe, through ceaseless efforts to guide them psychologically, the collapse of the socialist camp did not signal the end of hope for the working classes who are waiting for the world to change foundation, as the hymn of the International states.
For a good many years now, Algeria has been the theatre of an unprecedented bloodstained conflict between, on the one hand, the forces of extreme reaction which are supported more or less openly by various imperialist circles, and on the other, by the forces which represent the aspirations for evolution toward a modern democratic life, either the forces who want to restrict their struggle, from the point of view of political institutions, to a kind of capitalism comparative with that of the western countries, or the communist forces who believe that democratic struggles are nothing more than a necessary stage in the long and difficult course toward socialism.
The present conflicts have produced tens of thousands of deaths, the murder of 400 trade unionists, of hundreds of progressive and democratic intellectuals; they have caused material damages calculated at 16 billion dollars (public enterprises, schools, etc.) and have wiped out the achievements of entire decades of building the economy.
Islamic fascism is the fruit of the following factors:
1. The machinations of the imperialist forces which have encouraged it politically and economically in order to combat the communist and national progressive
movement. The thugs of Islamic fascism have been trained by the thousands, militarily and ideologically, in Afghanistan.
2. The ideological and political work of certain bourgeois factions, and in particular:
The Algerian upper bourgeois class of merchants who have been accumulating enormous fortunes in the past 30 years. This faction of the bourgeois class believed that the time had come for it to start taking power, pushing aside the bureaucratic factions standing in the way of its class ambitions;
the big landowners from whom agrarian reform removed part of their lands and who were able to get these lands back thanks to demonstrations organised by the Islamic parties and also thanks to their connections with the far-right groups in power;
Capitalist groups who use old-fashioned technological methods and who are ready to support a dictatorship on the pretext of religion in order to exploit the working people.
3. The manoeuvres of the opportunist bourgeois class that was created inside the State machinery owing to the corruption and high-handedness that the regime imposed by the sole party allowed to develop on a large scale. This faction of the bourgeois class flourished mainly after 1980. It put a brake on plans for industrial development, disrupted the public sector and agricultural co-operatives, created excessive debts for the country, importing unnecessary goods, and launched a process by which communists were distanced from the tasks they were performing democratically within the ranks of the trade unions, mass organisations, and in women’s, youth and students’ organisations. This section of the bourgeois class urged the Islamic groups which constituted a small minority, to take control of the mosques and to organise actions against the communists. This is why it bears the overwhelming blame for the rise of fundamentalist fascism.
Our Party is now facing an exceptionally difficult and dangerous situation because, even though the armed fascist groups have sustained serious defeats, the fascist threat has not yet been completely eliminated, and the outcome remains unsure.
This situation is difficult for the following reasons:
There are within the ranks of power today significant trends who want to reach an understanding with the Islamic parties so that they may rule and plunder the country jointly, within the framework of plans for structural adjustment, privatisation, etc.
The modernist currents in the bourgeois class, either inside or outside the state machinery, military men and citizens, fight against Islamic and compromising currents but without seeking real support from the popular masses. These modernist currents are in favour of disbanding the public sector and abolishing social gains; they support the agreements with the IMF whose implementation caused economic disaster, the destitution of the popular masses, and loss of our country’s independence. As a consequence of their adherence to this programme, they cannot count on the support of the masses, even though they are becoming more and more concerned, or pretend to be concerned, about the effects of this situation.
The various Islamic trends still exercise a great influence on large sections of the popular masses and the working people, who are politically inexperienced and ideologically weak.
The imperialist forces use the Islamic card to extract the greatest concessions from the factions in power, both on the economic level, through the liberalisation of foreign trade, opening up oil and natural gas deposits to foreign companies, and continuing repayment of the debt; and on the political level, with the «dialogue without exclusions» which aims to make their Islamic allies partners in power. Imperialist pressures were stepped up through the demand put forward by various sectors and forces loyal to imperialism, such as the Socialist International, to set up an international investigating committee which will be supposedly entrusted with revealing the identity of those who perpetrated the great massacres of recent months. In reality, this campaign aims to restore the Rome Convention and the Front of Islamic Salvation (FIS) in order to broaden the social bases of the adventurist bourgeois class. The various circles of imperialism believe that this expansion is necessary to permit the bourgeois class to exercise political control over the country and to crush the working people’s resistance to the implementation of super-liberal economic and social plans.
The communist movement has been weakened, despite its brilliant history and 60 years of heroic ceaseless struggles for various freedoms, for land, for national sovereignty, and for social progress. At the same time it suffered the double blow of the collapse of the socialist camp and the spectacular rise of Islamic fascism. But the effects of this blow were more widespread because of the political and ideological mistakes made by the communists. At this moment, a self-critical discussion is under way in order that we may draw the necessary conclusions to shed light on our struggles today and in the future.
Despite the mortal danger of fundamentalist fascism, this situation led in 1992 to the dissolution of the Party of Socialist Vanguard (PAGS), the party of Algerian communists. A minority group usurped the leadership of PAGS and set about to reject Marxism-Leninism and the goal of communism on the pretext of the failure of socialism and the urgent need to combat Islamic fanaticism. In 1993, the communist group founded PADS, based on confirmation of Marxism-Leninism as a means of leading the struggle of the exploited and oppressed.
PADS set as its target the reorganisation of the Communist Party, assuming at the same time its historical and political responsibilities in the fight against Islamic fascism.
Its course is structured around the building of:
1. A large Communist Party rooted in the working class and among farmers;
2. A popular democratic anti-fascist front to mobilise the masses around the following
goals:
to bar the way to Islamic fascism and to impose on it an irreversible defeat;
to defend the democratic freedoms that are being trampled by the alliance of centre forces with the appeasers who are currently in power;
to defend the achievements of development and national independence that the IMF agreements dispute threateningly;
to preserve the working people’s social gains;
3. Alliances with the democratic modernist section of the bourgeois class, and even
with the anti-fundamentalist groups in power.
On an international level, PADS believes, as proved by the risks entailed in the struggles being carried out in Algeria, that the workers and the peoples should develop all forms of political solidarity, material and moral, and promote co-ordinated action and collaboration in order to face international reaction.
Never has it been so necessary for national and international struggles to be closely linked. This is the reply to the «globalisation» of domination by international financial capital and the bourgeois class of the monopolies.
One hundred and fifty years after the publication of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, the positions formulated by Marx and Engels remain most timely:
1. The contradiction between the new demands put forward by modern forces of production and the antiquated nature of capitalist relations of production, which stand in the way of satisfying the material, cultural and intellectual needs of the working people and all people who labour, has become sharper than ever before.
2. The fall of the socialist system unleashed the forces of revisionism and capitalism, which have set out to abolish the social and political gains won by the working people through struggle.
3. The world today harbours grave dangers of new wars. These dangers are associated with the following:
the build-up of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of the imperialist forces and above all of US imperialism, which uses its military potential to dictate its own terms, even to the other capitalist powers, and to impose the supremacy of the dollar as a means of plundering the wealth of the peoples, even of these other forces;
the creation of new regional imperialist centres (Russia, etc.), and the rise of intra-imperialist economic and political competition between the US, Europe and Asia;
The creation of an international force, which could be called a gendarmerie, charged with speedy intervention at any point on the planet in order to maintain the world capitalist order.
4. The concentration in the hands of the international media of powerful mechanisms to lead the public ideologically. These instruments of generalised stupefication are used to make the perpetuation of capitalism acceptable and possibly to offset the weaknesses of local reaction to popular pressures.
5. The offensive by big international financial capital against the national sovereignty of the peoples, on the pretext of globalisation.
6. The supports of revisionism for muzzling the working people, and class collaboration between the revisionists and the leading circles of imperialism;
7. The dissemination of ideologies that can split the working class: fundamentalism, nationalism, chauvinism, racism etc.
Contrary to what the champions of capitalism declare and contrary to the defeatist words of the apostates of communism, the fall of socialism, the causes of which must be studied in depth, does not refute the teachings of Marx, Engels and Lenin. The victory of capitalism is not final. It is just temporary, because the real prerequisites for the fall of capitalism and for the socialist revolution are becoming increasingly visible. The development of capitalism in depth and breadth in the Four Corners of the earth does not at all mean that it will be around for eternity. This development brings us closer to the socialist prospect, closer than in 1848, closer than in 1917, and closer than in 1945-48. Because what counts most for a Marxist in analysing the correlation of forces is not the treacherous view that bourgeois ideologues want to impose, but the real portents of the socialist revolution which capitalist development is accumulating involuntarily, such as:
The process of creating salaried people and proletarians which has affected broad sections of the population in the developed capitalist countries;
The shaping of an ever more numerous working class in previously underdeveloped countries of Asia, Latin America and Africa;
The growth of modern class struggles in the former colonial countries. Class struggles which today bring people of the same ethnic origin into battle on different sides forge the class consciousness which is necessary for the large-scale struggles to come;
The increasing internationalisation of daily life which is expressed through the fact that, for example, the Algerian working people are following with greater interest than ever before the struggles of workers in South Korea and Indonesia, thanks to the media developed by capitalism in order to disorient the masses and keep them under ideological submission.
This is why communists should reflect on how they should rely on objective positive developments to check the danger of backsliding. Because of the acute unresolved contradictions in capitalism, these processes can lead the bourgeois class to resort to high-handed or even fascist solutions to stand in the way of progress.
Communists should think about setting intermediate tasks to achieve a torrent of convergence:
Of action by the working class and the exploited popular masses in the developed capitalist countries;
Of the people’s struggles in the economically dominated countries to defend their sovereignty and their right to develop their own national productive forces.
One of these tasks could be to increase exchanges of views and discussions within the framework of meetings such as this one. Another is to undertake joint actions, even if initially they are only occasional.
These discussions and actions, that should be studied carefully in order for the unity of communists to go forward step by step, would represent gradual progress on the long road toward reconstituting a Communist International, so that the struggle especially that of the working people and the peoples against the dictates of G-8, the IMF, the World Bank and other similar institutions and organisations of imperialism, can be co-ordinated.
Whatever the difficulties, we come to this struggle with optimism, with revolutionary optimism that we draw from our Marxist-Leninist theory.
Long live proletarian internationalism!
Long live the unity of the international communist and workers’ movement!