Introduction:
The international working class and the oppressed peoples of the world are facing a global economic crisis of unprecedented proportions. From China to the former USSR to the USA, and especially in the oppressed nations of Asia, Africa and Latin America, mass unemployment, homelessness, hunger and disease are on the rise. Meanwhile, the imperialist governments of Europe, Japan and especially the USA have used the crisis to provide the monopoly capitalist financiers of their respective countries new billions of dollars worth of ill gotten wealth plundered from the peoples of the world, seemingly rewarding them for having created the devastating crisis. Moreover, the pronounced protectionist character of the imperialist government bailouts is fueling the drive toward a catastrophic world war. All these developments have occurred in a remarkably brief period of time.
Through the spring and summer of 2008, the United States subprime mortgage housing crisis grew rapidly. By the end of September it had developed into a general U.S. financial crisis; within weeks it became a world financial crisis and then a world capitalist economic crisis. By the time of the U.S. presidential election at the beginning of November, the bourgeois economists who had resisted using the word “recession,” were now uttering the “r” word.
In the USA, over a half million jobs were lost in November and in every
month since then! Increasingly, capitalist spokesmen have been forced
to mention the “Great Depression” of the 1930’s, their most dreaded
nightmare, to explain the breadth and depth of this economic crisis
that continues to grow worse despite all the global bailout trillions
that have been thrown in its path.*
* Jose Maria Sison, the outstanding Filipino revolutionary leader and Chairman of the International League of Peoples’ Struggle, has already begun to call it, “the Greater Depression.”
It was precisely in this current period of global capitalist collapse and paralysis that U.S. Republican Vice-Presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, claimed with a straight face: “this is no time to be experimenting with Socialism!” While U.S. and Western European bourgeois pundits, social democrats of all hues, petty bourgeois intellectuals, liberals and the like tore holes in much of Palin’s rhetoric, and many right wing U.S. politicians protested the fact that the trillion dollars or so being given by Bush, Paulson and McCain and Pelosi and Obama to “bail out” the monopoly capitalists and imperialists was placing the USA on a “slippery slope to socialism,” nevertheless, almost no voices in the world rose in opposition to this anti-socialist rhetoric.
The root cause of this global capitalist economic crisis lies in the very nature of the monopoly capitalist system. This system is based on the exploitation and super exploitation of the working class and the oppression of the peasantry around the world. Under capitalism, the working class is systematically short-changed when we exchange our labor for the capitalist’s wage payment. We cannot buy back the products that we make. The result is capitalist overproduction.
In the current imperialist stage of capitalism, this fundamental contradiction between labor and capital is sometimes, in some places, moderated, while it is intensified elsewhere. The contradiction, however, continues to operate everywhere throughout the capitalist world. In the USA, in recent years, the effects of this exploitative process were mitigated by consumer credit largely arising from an inflationary housing bubble which began to burst with the subprime mortgage crisis.
A necessary condition for this housing bubble was the complete dominance of U.S. monopoly finance capital over industrial capital, a condition which has ultimately led to the intensification of all the major contradictions facing capitalism in it imperialist stage. Bernard Madoff’s company was built on “thin air.” Yet it so closely resembled the rest of Wall Street finance capital that he was able to carry on his successful multi-billion dollar “ponzi scheme” for years and was only exposed and stopped by the general collapse of Wall Street. The utter dominance of finance capital has ripped asunder virtually any connection between actual product values and monetary valuation.* It has resulted in an unprecedented division of the world between “haves” and “have-nots” such that the global capitalist system is in paralysis.
* For example, as bailed out Bank of America was about to swallow up failing Merrill Lynch after the latter had lost $27 billion dollars in 2008, Merrill Lynch executives received a last minute $4 billion dollar “consolation prize,” with Bank of America’s blessing.
In desperation, even the most “free market” Republican politicians are
seeking radical collective answers to the economic collapse of their
capitalist system, including temporary nationalization of monopoly
corporations. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina
points out that it is “untenable to keep throwing good money after bad
into institutions such as Citigroup and Bank of America, which now have
a lower net value than the amount of public funds they have received.”
Senator Graham “said that many of his colleagues, including John
McCain, the defeated presidential candidate, agreed with his view that
nationalization of some banks should be ‘on the table’.” (See “Bank
nationalization gains currency with Republicans,” Financial Times,
2-18-09)* As
Professor Sison observes, “The gravity of the crisis can be deduced
from the enormity and significance of the debts incurred by the US
government, the private corporations and the American households. All
these debts are beyond the capacity of the debtors to pay back.”
(“Contribution to the Forum on the Global and Financial Crisis”,
1/30/09) There is no “bailout” or “stimulus package” that can save the
monopoly capitalist system from its ultimate doom.
* Professor Sison noted that “As the partner of private monopoly capitalism, state monopoly capitalism takes more forms than state ownership of enterprises, even as nationalization is a form that may become conspicuous in time of severe crisis.” (“Contribution to the Forum on the Global and Financial Crisis”, 1/30/09)
In the midst of this fertile revolutionary situation, there has been no powerful unified proletarian revolutionary voice, either within the USA or internationally, pointing out the obvious failure of the capitalist system and the deep need, the ripeness, indeed over-ripeness, for the proletarian socialist revolution, for proletarian state power, leading to a just, rational and peaceful global socialist political economy.
What the exploited and oppressed masses of the world need is a system
based on working class ownership of the means of production and
production for human needs not for private capitalist profit – a
socialist system with a planned economy run by workers in power like
that which existed in the Soviet Union from the 1920’s through the
1950’s.*
* In fact, in the last Great Depression, throughout the 1930’s, while the rest of the world was in economic crisis, the Soviet Union was growing by leaps and bounds. It was, in large part, on the basis of its tremendous victories in socialist economic construction during that period that the heroic Soviet Red Army and people, under the leadership of Stalin, the Bolshevik Party and the Communist International, were in a position to play the main role in the defeat of world fascism in World War II. The Soviet-led victory over fascism ushered in an unprecedented blossoming of democratic and socialist movements and governments around the world and the establishment of a formidable socialist camp.
Today, the old and dying parasitic imperialist capitalist system can no longer rule in the old way. However, the new and rising proletarian class, the international working class, is not close to being prepared to seize and hold state power. Consequently, a new period of terrible misery, want and starvation is rapidly descending upon more hundreds of millions of people world-wide. In this condition, there is a mass need, if not yet a widely articulated mass demand upon the proletarian vanguard forces globally to unite – to unite the workers of the world; to unite the oppressed peoples of the world; to unite the workers of the world with the oppressed peoples; and to unite themselves – all against international imperialism, headed by U.S. imperialism.
In order for the international working class and the oppressed peoples to achieve sufficient unity to successfully defend our interests against the imperialist onslaught in this new Great Depression and to then go from the defensive to the offensive and march on to socialism, communist leadership on a global scale is necessary. Such unity can only be achieved through constant interaction with the practical revolutionary tasks of the international working class and the oppressed peoples – the struggles against imperialism, headed by U.S. imperialism – for national liberation and for the proletarian seizure of power. Such unity can only be achieved through ideological, political and organizational struggle led by a unified international communist movement, a Communist International.
We hope this Newsletter will spark needed discussion among revolutionary-minded workers and communist organizations around the world. In this way it can serve as a contribution to the struggle for proletarian internationalist unity, for communist unity, for a New Communist International.
From the Belly of the Beast
By Ray O. Light
The October-November 2008 issue of Northstar Compass (NSC) carried much of the news of the Conference of the International Council for Friendship and Solidarity with Soviet People held in Toronto from October 10-12, 2008. In his first page editorial introducing the Conference and its highlights, Council Chairman and NSC Editor Michael Lucas devoted the entire second half of the editorial to the final resolution considered by the Conference, the unanimously passed resolution on the need for a new Communist International. As the person who had drafted the resolution upon the request of Chairman Lucas and the one who guided its passage at the Conference (with just a few amendments), I want to share some thoughts about this important issue as well as about its connection to the International Friendship Council and the Council’s biggest supporter over the years, the Society of Carpatho-Russian Canadians.
* Perhaps it was, at least in part, because I was the author of that document on behalf of Youth for Stalin some forty years ago that Chairman Lucas asked me to draft the International Council/NSC Conference resolution this past fall, raising the need for a new Communist International.
In 1925, Stalin had warned that, “… the danger of nationalism must be regarded as springing from the growth of bourgeois influence on the Party in the sphere of foreign policy, in the sphere of the struggle that the capitalist states are waging against the state of the proletarian dictatorship. There can scarcely be any doubt that the pressure of the capitalist states on our state is enormous, that the people who are handling our foreign policy do not always succeed in resisting this pressure, that the danger of complications often gives rise to the temptation to take the path of least resistance, the path of nationalism ... and that the path of least resistance and of nationalism in foreign policy is the path of isolation and decay of the first country to be victorious.” (Stalin, Selected Works, Volume 7, p. 170-171)
In 1968, almost every communist party or organization in the world was affiliated with and/or heavily influenced by either the Soviet revisionists in state power or the Chinese “Cultural Revolution” leadership in state power or both. The revolutionary internationalist cry of Che Guevara, calling for “two, three, many Vietnams” went unheeded. Instead, within the next few years, the Chinese revisionists, following the Soviet revisionist example, used the heroic struggle of the Vietnamese people against U.S. imperialism as a lever with which to develop its own rapprochement with U.S. imperialism. Bourgeois nationalism was now rampant in the international communist movement.
Of course, bourgeois bureaucracy, in place of proletarian revolutionary initiative, flourished in such a situation, especially within the parties in state power. Bourgeois bureaucratism and revisionist renegacy and renunciation of the revolutionary struggle for proletarian power were fully “appropriate” for rapprochement with U.S. imperialism, the main bulwark of world capitalism; and they were convenient for opportunist-dominated parties and organizations in oppressor, dependent and oppressed countries and nations that wanted to continue to have good relations with these parties in power.
This bourgeois nationalist and bureaucratic legacy of the last forty years lives on in the communist movement today in the widespread “conventional wisdom,” “worldly sophistication” and outright hostility toward the accomplishments of the communist movement worldwide during the period of the Communist International (Comintern). This opportunist legacy lives on despite the decay, disintegration and disappearance of the Socialist Camp in the post-Comintern period! It involves focusing a magnifying glass on every real and imagined error committed by the Communist International and its affiliates in every country, while turning “a blind eye” to the often fatal mistakes and opportunist policies of so-called communist parties in each country in the much longer period of time since the demise of the Comintern and since the abortive Cominform internationalist organizational effort following the end of World War II.
The lengthy quote from Comrade Stalin cited in our Conference
Resolution on the need for a new Communist International is taken from
Foundations of Leninism, written in 1924, over eighty-four years ago.
Stalin observed: “Formerly, the analysis of the conditions for the
proletarian revolution was usually approached from the point of view of
the economic state of individual countries. Now, this approach is no
longer adequate. Now the matter must be approached from the point of
view of the state of the world economy; for individual countries and
individual national economies have ceased to be self-sufficient units,
have become links in a single chain called world economy; for the old
‘cultured’ capitalism has evolved into imperialism, and imperialism is
a world system of financial enslavement and [neo-]*colonial oppression
of the vast majority of the population of the earth by a handful of
‘advanced’ countries.”
* The Conference’s one-word amendment “updating” the Stalin quote is in brackets.
The validity of Stalin’s observation has been born out more dramatically this year than ever before. For the world capitalist crisis that began as a subprime mortgage crisis in the USA just a few short months ago, spread within weeks, days even, throughout every corner of the globe. Despite this fact, there are hardly any current communist parties or organizations in the world of any size and significance, which proceed as comrade Stalin has indicated. Instead, on the eve of 2009, most communist parties and organizations in the world, no matter how serious, positive and even courageous their day to day work may be, are crippled by an analysis that proceeds from the economic state (as well as the political situation) of their own individual countries, described by comrade Stalin as “no longer adequate” over eighty-four years ago!*
* For example, had the world communist movement been armed with a proletarian internationalist world outlook over the past two years, “the Obama phenomenon”, providing a new and exciting façade for bourgeois democratic illusions about the U.S. imperialist state, and thus representing a new U.S. imperialist ideological and political counter-offensive, would have been thoroughly exposed. With a clear internationalist view that the liberation movements of the Afghani and Iraqi peoples are on the frontlines of our struggle, President-elect Obama’s decision to retain George W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, would have been the “last straw” rather than the first hint about Obama’s key role in defense of the U.S. Empire.
The “left” and right opportunism with which bourgeois nationalism
permeates the world wide communist movement today is manifested in
widespread resistance to a proletarian Leninist policy of consistent
internationalism. This, no doubt, will continue to include resistance
to its organizational manifestation, resistance to taking any serious
step, even the most preliminary, needed to begin building a new
Communist International.
Secondly, the International Council for Friendship and Solidarity with Soviet People is not a vanguard organization at all. Indeed, the Conference Resolution specifically states that “we function as a united front organization.” (Emphasis in Resolution) In my view, the political strength of the modest organization and work of the International Council and Northstar Compass lies precisely in its recognition of both its limitations as a mass pro-socialist and non-vanguard organization and its limitless aspirations for resurrection of socialism in the former USSR and proletarian socialist revolution on a world scale.
In resistance to the positive work of NSC/International Council and, specifically, in opposition to NSC/IC’s promotion of the need for a new Communist International, two incorrect propositions are put forward with regard to its non-communist and mass character, coming from opposite directions. One is that NSC/International Council is or should be a communist organization. The other is that, as a non-communist organization, NSC/International Council has no business taking a stand on such a vanguard issue as the need for a Communist International.
On the one hand, some individuals and groups with pro socialist and pro communist sympathies advocate turning NSC/International Council, a Friendship society, into a vanguard organization. Among their ranks are some who have made a positive contribution to NSC/IC work but have illusions about their own capacity and that of NSC/International Council to function as revolutionary communists in the current situation. They seriously underestimate the immense tasks involved in the revolutionary struggle for proletarian power against the brutal imperialist enemy. They confuse mass, class and vanguard levels of organization and discipline. They are unwilling and/or unable to help build communist vanguard organization and to submit to the collective life and discipline required to mobilize millions of toilers through their own experience to make the revolution; they believe that merely espousing a belief in something is sufficient to make it happen.
On the other hand, some self-proclaimed communist individuals, parties and organizations protest that this united front organization has no business sticking its nose into communist business. To these petty bourgeois opportunists, the vanguard organization is not dialectically interconnected to the working class and the toiling masses, but is separate from and over and above the class and the masses. This is precisely the opposite of Lenin’s teachings! He and the other great teachers of scientific socialism – Marx, Engels, Stalin and Mao, among them (and to one extent or another, the revolutionary parties and organizations they led) – have practiced the mass line, from the masses to the masses. As Mao so simply and profoundly expressed it to the Chinese Communists in the crucible of the Chinese national democratic revolution, “we must be their [the masses’] pupil before we can be their teacher.”
International Council/Northstar Compass, while having tiny numbers relative to the immense tasks the international proletariat and the oppressed peoples face, is at one with the millions of revolutionary-minded masses of toilers throughout the world who are consciously or unconsciously striving for a world of peace and plenty, striving for a world of socialism, to be born out of the current world of increasing starvation, want, violence and injustice. In this way, the International Council/Northstar Compass’ demand on the international communist movement to undertake once again the construction of a new Communist International, capable of providing general guidance and some organizational strength for the world proletarian revolution in our time, is a mass demand.*
* It is worth noting, in this connection, the current work of progressive U.S. professor Grover Furr based on now accessible Soviet archives. Professor Furr has exposed the great struggle led by Stalin around the 1936 Soviet Constitution in which Stalin, through changes in the election law, etc., tried to open up the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to criticisms by the non-Party masses, to make the Party answerable to the class and the masses.
We must work diligently to make this mass demand, this call for a new communist international, grow in intensity and strength. For it will meet with great resistance not only from the imperialist powers, led by U.S. imperialism, but from the dominant opportunist forces in the current so-called World Marxist Movement.
Given this political climate, how has NSC/International Council been able to emerge and survive and now call on vanguard organizations to build a new Communist International?
“Hands Off Russia!” Committees were formed in Canada as well as in the USA and elsewhere in 1918 to defend the new workers’ government born out of the victorious Russian Proletarian Revolution of 1917. The blatant intervention in Russia of a dozen imperialist armies in alliance with the former Tsarist armed forces in the attempt to overthrow the Bolshevik regime led by Lenin prompted workers all over the world to come to the defense of the new workers power. Later on, Michael Lucas spent decades as a key Canadian Communist Party leader assigned to work in the area of Canadian-Soviet Friendship, the later incarnation of the Hands Off Russia Committees. Lucas’ position in the Canadian CP and specifically in the Soviet Friendship work helped him to see clearly the catastrophic conditions that developed rapidly in the former USSR after the Gorbachev-Yeltsin forces led the return to open capitalism.
In 1992, Lucas began the Northstar Compass journal exposing the new capitalist regime in Russia. He rallied to NSC’s banner the members of the Canadian Friends of Soviet People who (in the face of the now revisionist Canadian CP’s hostility) had remained loyal to its pro socialist aims. While the International Council was launched in 2001, the Canadian Friends has remained the cornerstone of the organization and the journal. Particularly exemplary has been the upholding of the historical accomplishments of Socialism, especially in the USSR. A massive, well-funded, imperialist ideological offensive, following the dissolution of the Socialist Camp, has claimed that socialism was a failure and is finished once and for all. It has been ably exposed by NSC which has documented the need for the Soviet peoples to go “Back to the Future”, i.e., the socialist future.
Probably even more important to the survival and modest but significant success of NSC/International Council has been its organic connection to the Society of Carpatho-Russian Canadians (SCRC). Michael Lucas is himself a son of the Carpathian Mountains. He came to Canada (along with his mother) to join his father, William Lukac, already functioning there as a communist miner and union organizer. Father, mother and son all were long time Canadian communists. And all became active in the SCRC (“the Carps”) as did Michael’s wife, Helen Lucas.
Like most immigrant nationality groups in the capitalist world, the Carpatho-Russians organized themselves to defend their rights in Canada and the rights of their people back home. Beginning in Winnipeg in 1929, the organization spread quickly to a number of cities throughout Canada. The “Carps” were very active in protest demonstrations and labor picket lines. The political activism and the mass character of the SCRC are both reflected in the fact that at one point, out of 247 members of the Toronto branch of the SCRC, 94 were members of the Party Club of the Communist Party.
During World War II, a large number joined the Canadian military to fight against fascism and for Canadian democracy and Soviet socialism. Many then returned to the Carpathian Mountains to help build socialism in their native land. Meanwhile, post World War II immigrants to Canada from the region included a much larger percentage of pro-imperialists, fascists, and other reactionaries. In the resulting struggles among the nationality groupings in Canada, and with the beginnings of the Cold War and the real possibility of the organization being banned, the SCRC decided that it needed to buy its own building in Toronto. It purchased what is now the Friendship House in 1946 using its membership fees from around the country for this purpose. This valuable property was paid off in 1960 and was celebrated with a burning of the mortgage.
As Chairman Lucas pointed out in his recently published book, “From the Carpathian Mountains to Canada,” “The SCRC always cooperated with the Hands Off Russia Committee, Friends of Soviet People, Aid to Russia Fund, helping … the Canada-USSR Association … From 1972, the Canada-USSR Association-Canadian Friends of Soviet People were welcomed to use the offices and the Carpathian Ballroom for all their meetings and receptions, without any rental costs at all.”(p.97) Lucas explained the consistent internationalism of this nationality-based immigrant organization as follows: “Our Carpatho-Russian Society was NEVER nationalistically orientated and always believed and believes in Internationalism and Socialism … Nationalism is just as dangerous in the long run as its collective partner and supporter – capitalism, imperialism and fascism. … But, when you are subjected by enemies … to unwarranted criticism, we are then guided by J.V. Stalin’s work on the Nationality Question … and we must stand up and defend ourselves.” (p. 91)
The language of the official non-profit status, finally conferred on the SCRC in 1982 by the Canadian government of Ontario Province, makes clear the consistent internationalism of this immigrant nationality organization: “no member or director of this Corporation can sell any part of this corporation’s assets, or to invest or to profit from any principal assets of this Corporation.” Noteworthy, also, is the provision that prohibited memberships from being passed on to the members’ children. As a result, in contrast to the narrow bourgeois nationalism prevalent even in the most progressive immigrant groups in our time, SCRC anticipated the ultimate dissolution of the Corporation, providing that “after payment of all debts and liabilities, its remaining property shall be distributed or disposed of to other charitable organizations or movements” which have aims and objectives similar to the SCRC.
Thus, the Society of Carpatho-Russian Canadians envisioned the day of its own demise and provided a basis for the SCRC to continue to contribute to the cause of democracy and socialism after its own progeny had become assimilated into Canadian society. Today, in his early 80’s, Michael Lucas continues to keep the faith. As he expresses it, “ Our Society of Carpatho-Russian Canadians was from the very beginning and is now and will be as long as it will exist, dedicated to Socialism, to the USSR and to its future resurrection, to Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, to internationalism, and we shall always be against Imperialism under whatever label or flag it is hiding. We shall always be together with all of the progressive movements of the world.” (ibid, page 90)
Born and raised in the crucible of the struggle to defend proletarian socialism in the USSR and under the guidance of the Communist International, both the Society of Carpatho-Russian Canadians as well as the Hands Off Russia Committee and its Canada-Soviet Friendship Society offspring have demonstrated the strength of non-party mass organizations when they are trained in the spirit of proletarian internationalism. It is largely on this basis that the International Council for Friendship with Soviet People has earned the right to call on proletarian vanguard organizations around the world to take an active part in the construction of a new communist international, in the course of their efforts to unite the oppressed masses and the international working class against imperialism, headed by U.S. imperialism. For Michael Lucas and many of the Canadian Friends of Soviet People have the experience to know that this latter task can only be successfully accomplished under the leadership of a Communist International.
[Amended and Adopted unanimously by the Conference of the International Council for Friendship and Solidarity with Soviet People held in Toronto, Canada on 10-12-08]
We representatives of the International Council for Friendship and Solidarity with Soviet People gathered together at the International Council Conference in Toronto, Canada from October 10-12, 2008 hereby declare the following:
Our international council is an organized expression of friendship and solidarity with “Soviet people”, i.e. the people struggling to restore the multinational Soviet Union as a Socialist State. This Council, along with our organ, Northstar Compass, is carrying on the traditions of the “Hands Off Russia Committee”(s) which were internationally established in 1918 to help protect the young Soviet Republic from foreign intervention.
We function as a united front organization to help unify, consolidate and coordinate the anti-imperialist forces of the world with the ongoing world movement to restore the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Our aim is international cooperation in building socialism and solidarity with all anti-imperialist forces struggling against imperialism, headed by U.S. imperialism, the main enemy of mankind.
The current situation includes the continued U.S. led military occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. It includes the rapidly unfolding economic collapse of Wall Street and the U.S. Empire. And it includes the political brinksmanship of the Bush-Cheney-McCain and Obama forces in support of the U.S. puppet dictator Saakashvili in Georgia. Bush, McCain, Obama et al. are promoting “fast track” inclusion of Georgia as a member of NATO which amounts to a declaration of war against Russia. It is clear that with regard to war and peace, justice and injustice, freedom and tyranny, the upcoming U.S. Presidential Election offers no alternative for the workers and oppressed of the USA and the world. Finally, the current grave and ever deepening world capitalist economic crisis, featuring the collapsing hegemony and unprecedented debt of United States imperialism, is driving the major imperialist powers toward a new world war, toward a new re-division of the world on the basis of the new relation of forces.
The history of the international communist and workers movement in the first half of the twentieth century demonstrated: With Leninism and the Communist International, despite an unfavorable objective situation, victories – culminating in the Soviet led defeat of world fascism and the victorious Chinese national democratic revolution. Without Leninism and without a Communist International, despite the objectively favorable post World War II situation, defeats – culminating in the dissolution of the Socialist Camp. Given the above-mentioned facts, we call upon all proletarian vanguard parties and organizations to get back to their Leninist roots and principles.
Stalin, the great leader of Socialist construction of the USSR and of the defeat of world fascism in World War II, pointed out in Foundations of Leninism:
“Formerly, the analysis of the conditions for the proletarian revolution was usually approached from the point of view of the economic state of individual countries. Now, this approach is no longer adequate. Now the matter must be approached from the point of view of the state of the world economy; for individual countries and individual national economies have ceased to be self-sufficient units, have become links in a single chain called world economy; for the old ‘cultured’ capitalism has evolved into imperialism, and imperialism is a world system of financial enslavement and [neo-]colonial oppression of the vast majority of the population of the earth by a handful of ‘advanced’ countries. ...
“Formerly, it was the accepted thing to speak of the proletarian revolution in one or another developed country as of something separate and self-sufficient, facing a separate national front of capital as its opposite. Now we must speak of the world proletarian revolution; for the separate national fronts of capital have become links in a single chain called the world front of imperialism, which must be opposed by a common front of the revolutionary movement in all countries.”
In order for the international working class and the oppressed peoples to avoid being split up, divided and conquered by the imperialist powers and U.S. imperialism, in particular; to instead divide, isolate and smash the enemies of peace, justice, freedom and socialism, we call on the proletarian vanguard parties and organizations to unite the international working class and the oppressed peoples against imperialism, headed by U.S. imperialism, on the basis of proletarian internationalism. In the process, we urge genuine communist and workers parties not to shy away from but to embrace the challenge of building a new Communist International, in the tradition of the outstanding Third International, established under Lenin’s leadership and on the shoulders of the Russian Revolution and the Soviet working class.
We representatives of the International Council for Friendship and Solidarity with Soviet People believe, in the words of “The Internationale,”
“The international working class shall be the human race!”