International Conference on 24th November in Hamburg: the speech by the Communist Organization M-L Voie Proletarienne - France

DECLARATION BY THE OCML Voie Prolétarienne (France)

Hamburg, 24 November 2012

We are happy to be able to salute the remarkable struggle being waged by our comrades in India. 20,000 armed combatants fighting under the flag of Communism, tens of thousands of people providing political and logistical support facing tens of thousands of soldiers and paramilitaries sent out by the Capitalist power centre in New Delhi. A massive class war silenced by the bourgeois media in France.

But at the same time, Capitalism is increasingly showing itself to be disastrous for the workers, with unemployment for some and inhumane working conditions for others and austerity and insecurity for all. The crisis of capitalism is never-ending and has been worsening by leaps and bounds for nearly forty years.

Yet, while the idea that revolution is necessary is making inroads, the leadership of the main political parties and unions remain reformist, social-democratic and eminded. They look to Venezuela and Ecuador in South America for their revolutionary references and reduce the Arab revolutions to a mere yearning for democracy. For example, last February Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the Left Front, which includes the French Communist Party, welcomed the announced promise of the sale of 126 Rafale fighter planes to the Indian government, despite the fact that these aircraft are equipped with a wide-ranging detection capacity and targeted intervention.

Our organisation has condemned this imperialist chauvinism and has pointed to the CGT trade-union at the Michelin tyre factory as the example to follow. French imperialist companies all want to carve out a place for themselves in India, but the Michelin trade-union stood firm against the jingoism of the company and against the defence of its own country when it declared its solidarity with the fight of the peasants in India, opposing the building of a Michelin factory in Tamil Nadu. The union’s joint complaint presented together with four associations, two French and two Indian, was recently upheld by the OECD.

This initiative alone, albeit limited in its scope, serves to illustrates certain principles of our political strategy:

1.      It is not the revolution in ‘developed’ capitalist countries that will have a bearing on the dominated countries, but the reverse, with the revolution in the dominated countries triggering the world revolution. Marx himself acknowledged as much in a letter of self-criticism he wrote to Engels on 10 December 1869 regarding the situation in Ireland and the English working class. Lenin brought the same issue to the fore, for example, at the Congress of the Peoples of the East held in Baku in 1920. And it is what Mao described as “the storm zone”.

2.      The majority of what were once colonial or semi-colonial and feudal or semi-feudal countries are now dominated by both national and international capitalism and in certain cases have even become regional or ‘emerging’ imperialists. Nevertheless, imperialist domination and inter-imperialist competition are ever more ruthless.

3.      In the dominated countries and the ex-colonies, peasants represent a significant section of the exploited workers. The triumph of the world communist revolution will only be possible through an alliance between the workers and the peasants and between the prolonged people’s war in the countryside and insurrection in the towns and cities in line with the strategies taken up anew by our Maoist comrades in Nepal. This alliance between the hammer and the sickle did not take place during the Paris Commune of 1871, but it did occur during the Russian Revolution in Lenin’s time. This alliance remains vital today.

4.      In France, our main enemy is the bourgeoisie, French imperialist capitalism. This dominant class has agents within the working class movement, and we are currently dominated by them. In France, the anti-imperialist forces and the Maoist militants are weak. In order to develop international solidarity, we must build up the organisations in our own countries. Our immediate key task in France is to build a Marxist-Leninist party within the working class.

5.      All of those who combat our imperialism, in India and elsewhere, are our allies in our fight against imperialism, against our reformist leaders and for the construction of our party.

Long live the struggle of our comrades in India!

Long live international solidarity!

Long live the worldwide proletarian revolution!