Imperialist decay demands revolutionary response

Some 36 Marxist activists, writers and thinkers from 15 countries gathered Oct. 5, 6 and 7 in the town of Serpa in the Alentejo region of Portugal to contribute to a special kind of conference. They dedicated their contributions to examining the challenges facing the working-class movement in the post-Soviet period, as the world system of capitalism and imperialism experiences a deep, broad and perhaps terminal crisis.

Reinaldo Carcanholo (Brazil), Remy Herrera (France) and Leila Ghanem (Lebanon) at Serpa, Portugal, conference. WW photo: John Catalinotto

The team that maintains the Portuguese-language website odiario.info organized the conference with the help of the municipality of Serpa and the magazine Vertice.

Unlike some gatherings of academic Marxists—even those few who apply Marx’s teachings instead of the many who try to revise his most important work—this one was made up mostly of political activists, some of them leaders of communist parties. They supported the struggle of the oppressed nations against imperialism; most looked to the working class as the revolutionary subject of history and to the Russian revolutionary leader Lenin for an approach toward organizing a struggle for state power.

The Alentejo was a center of anti-fascist struggle during the decades before Portugal’s 1974 revolution. In 1962 hundreds of thousands of agricultural workers challenged the fascist Salazar regime with strikes for the eight-hour day. Though the region’s economy has completely changed in mere decades, the traditions of class struggle and anti-imperialist struggle remain and this region is still a stronghold of the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP).

Many of the hundreds of people attending the sessions of the conference were from the Alentejo or had done some of their political work there. It seemed like everyone over 50 years of age had either worked clandestinely, been in the fascist prisons, broken out of them, or all three. Such an audience encouraged rigor and discipline on the part of the speakers.

The conference’s title was “Civilization or Barbarism.” Many of the speakers—some of whom were economists—dissected the serious crises faced by the capitalist world economy and their impact on the working class. Others attacked U.S. imperialism’s aggressive wars and the European ruling classes that joined these adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, or who supported the Israeli regime in Palestine.

The conference’s guiding theme, however, was how to promote a socialist revolution to overcome the misery heaped on the mass of humanity by a globalized imperialist system in crisis. A concurrent theme was how also to overcome the setback to socialist ideology that followed the material loss to the world workers’ movement of the Soviet Union and the East European socialist countries of 1989-1991.

Speakers came from India, Egypt and Lebanon. Most came from Portugal itself, from France and the other Latin-language countries in Europe and from across Latin America, including Mexico, Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Argentina and Brazil, and one from the United States. The Latin American speakers reflected both the opportunities arising from the election of progressive leaders—especially in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador—and also the challenges faced by the revolutionary movements in those countries.

Marcos Domich, international secretary of the Communist Party of Bolivia, warned of the threat of counter-revolution in his country: “The ruling classes and the owners of property never abandon their power and privileges without putting up a battle.”

Isabel Monal, editor of the Cuban journal “Marx Ahora” (Marx Now), underlined the vital importance of the emergence of Indigenous leadership of many of the struggles in Latin America, pointing to Evo Morales in Bolivia.

Cuba had a special place in the hearts and minds of the participants, as was shown in the conference’s closing statement: “Demand an end to the blockade imposed on Cuba by the USA and salute the Cuban people for their example of heroic and victorious resistance to imperialism.”

Lebanese environmental editor Leila Ghanem discussed the role of the Islam-based movements Hezbollah and Hamas in combating imperialism and Zionism in Lebanon and Palestine. This explanation was needed to promote solidarity for these struggles among progressive movements in Europe and North America.

Angeles Maestro from Spain exposed the horror imperialist globalization inflicts on countries like Nigeria, forcing a migration that is as deadly as the “middle passage” of the slave trade. One of every three immigrants drowns on the perilous trip to an uncertain future in Europe.

Other speakers exposed the threat to the workers in the imperialist centers. These workers now face a relentless attack on their wages, benefits and way of life. Social democratic parties, which at one time promoted benefits, are now imposing these pro-capitalist neo-liberal policies.

The Portuguese communist journalist Miguel Urbano Rodrigues, a key organizer of the conference, ended his contribution with the following call to struggle: “To pass therefore from the defensive to the offensive is a requirement of our time, imposed upon the forces and parties for which the alternative to [imperialist] barbarism is socialism.”

Workers World managing editor John Catalinotto presented a paper entitled “Imperialist Globalization Creates Its Own Gravediggers” and spoke on the class struggle within the U.S. at a satellite meeting in nearby Beja, Portugal, and at a meeting in Madrid, Spain. See odiario.info for the conference statement and for the contributions in the original language and in Portuguese. E-mail: [email protected]