Workers, young people and comrades,
In Seattle, Geneva, Melbourne, Prague … everywhere, the leading functionaries of world capitalism are beginning to find the "welcome" they deserve. But today’s demonstration is of particular international importance because it exposes a lie that has been repeated ad nauseam by the mind benders of Western propaganda: "After the collapse of Eastern Europe’s false socialist regimes, the massive arrival of Western capital will lead to the flowering of freedom and well-being for everyone".
Privatisation and the management of foreign debts by the IMF and the World Bank have allowed our Lords of the Dollar, Euro and Sterling to become the masters of the East, but the only things flourishing in the new "private garden" of Western imperialism are super-exploitation, redundancies, precariousness, degradation, prostitution, military expenditure, the police, and new cliques of power such as that of Havel&Co. – lapdogs obedient to every order imparted by the United States and the European Union. There is no trace of the "liberty and well-being for all" – but there are the "welcoming" signs of the beginning of an anti-capitalist movement!
The truth is that the current globalisation of capital is not a means of encouraging development in the East – and even less in the South of the world.
On the contrary, it is a ferocious concentration of the last remnants of capitalist development (a capitalism that is being increasingly submerged by its inextricable contradictions) in a handful of countries and, inside these countries, exclusively in the hands of their ruling classes. As a result, instead of development, four-fifths of the world know nothing but starvation, poverty, the destruction of natural and human resources … and war.
Ask the peoples of Yugoslavia … where the political and economic penetration of the West (with the collaboration of the servile local micro-bourgeosies) first promoted and imposed the secession of Slovenia and Croatia, then triggered ethnic purification in Croatia and the war in Bosnia, and finally arrived at the point of direct NATO aggression against Yugoslavia itself – an aggression that is still far from coming to an end. All of ex-Yugoslavia is now covered by the rubble of "peace" and war; the living conditions of its workers have returned to what they were twenty or fifty years ago; Bosnia and Kosovo have become ethnic States; and "liberated" Kosovo has been transformed into a giant American/NATO barracks from which Western gangsters (Clinton, Albright, Amato, Blair, Chirac, Fischer … the "green" Fischer …) threaten the proletariat and oppressed masses of the entire Slav world as they prepare themselves for the next stage of their Eastward march toward the final objectives of Russia and China.
The events in Yugoslavia and in Iraq (perhaps better than anything else) clearly show that the guiding forces of world capitalism (from Wall Street to the Pentagon, from G-7 to the WTO, from NATO to the UN) are ready to use any form of criminal violence that gives them the freedom to suck the last ounce of blood from workers, peasants and tertiary labour, and to pillage everywhere and without restraint the resources of nature, with the sole aim of accumulating money … money … and still more money-capital.
It is this that is making the lives of the young and working people increasingly unsustainable not only in the South, but also in the North of the world, and provoking a series of mass reactions against the effects of capitalist globalisation: from the struggles of Argentinian and Korean workers to those of Indian peasants and farmhands against Monsanto; from the protest in Seattle with all of its varied motivations to the world march of women against poverty and violence; from the struggles of Rumanian and Russian miners to those of the Polish workers and peasants; from the heroic resistance of the peoples of Yugoslavia and Iraq to the small but precious victory of the exploited Lebanese against Israel; from the fight for land of black peasants in Zimbabwe to the struggles of immigrant workers in Italy and Spain…
So many struggles against so many manifestations of exploitation, oppression and the alienation created by capitalism … which we must support and drive onward until they converge into one single battle against capitalism. The individual opponents of these struggles (enterprises, governments, multinationals, financial institutions, military alliances, landowners, imperialist States, etc.) are nothing but articulations of a single system of economic and social relationships: the system of world capitalism. And this can only be defeated by concentrating all of the forces of the exploited and oppressed around the world’s proletariat. This is the crucial question.
But governments and the leaders of the IMF and World Bank are doing everything in their power to divide people (workers against ecologists and the young, the whites of the North against the people of the South, women against men, "criminals" against "reasonable people"), and then to divide the struggles nation by nation, category by category, objective by objective … Their aim is to convince us all – by means of repression or the sirens of "dialogue" – to interrupt or limit the direct mobilisation of the masses, and to delegate this or that national or international (even - but actually only apparently - "non-government") institution to examine and "solve" – on our behalf – "individual" problems in meetings and negotiations with the "competent authorities": i.e. the very enemy we have to fight and defeat! This is the trap that is being prepared.
Workers, young people and comrades,
We must not fear repression or be diverted from our goal, because any attempt to reform an unreformable system can lead to nothing but a dead end! Although it may put on a show of wanting to "understand" us and even claim to have the same aims as ourselves (that is what one of the horn-faced representatives of the IMF actually said!), the globalised capitalist monster is in reality simply preparing itself to smother these first signs of the recovery of an international proletarian movement.
This is something we must not allow! We have to pursue and broaden our direct mobilisation! Unite our forces in an equally global and organised struggle! Equip ourselves with a class programme capable of opposing the iron laws of the market and the capitalist organisation of social life by establishing the general perspective of an alternative form of society that finally responds to the needs of mankind and non-human nature.
We are not afraid of acknowledging what our adversaries already know and understand: i.e. that all of the "skirmishes" in course are evocations of a new, non-classist, non-racist and non-sexist social system, whose goal is not the accumulation of profit but the full satisfaction of the genuine human needs of a humanity that has rediscovered how to live in harmony with nature. Nor are we afraid of calling this new organisation of social life communism simply because this name was once usurped by the nationalist bourgeois regimes opposed by true communists: these regimes had nothing communist in their principles of economic or political organisation, but actually excluded the exploited working classes from power.
Although it may now appear to be weak and sometimes even absent from the world political scene, we have faith in calling upon the proletariat to re-establish itself, equip itself with the truly international communist party organisation it needs, and to set itself in the vanguard of a worldwide class front that unites the exploited and oppressed of all races and nationalities!
The battle against capitalist imperialism and its laws of misery and death has only just begun!