International meeting in Portugal says: Fight for
socialism
Special to Workers World
Serpa, Portugal
Marxist intellectuals, directors of cultural organizations
and organizer-activists on the left from Europe and the
Americas met in the small city of Serpa in Portugal's Alentejo
region on Sept. 23-25 at a conference on "Civilization or
Barbarism?" It was a discussion of contemporary world
problems.
Held before some hundreds of Portu guese political
activists, the discussion concerned the grave crisis imposed on
humanity by world imperialism in the 21st century. About half
the speakers were from Portugal, the rest mainly from Europe,
Latin America and Africa, especially from the former Portuguese
colonies of Brazil and Angola.
The conference's organizers considered that humanity was
facing a global crisis that was simultaneously economic,
social, financial, environmental and cultural and involved the
likely exhaustion of the current energy sources. This crisis is
inseparable from U.S. imperialism's project of "endless war"
that is aimed at world domination and threatens the very
existence of humanity.
Many presenters focused on the gravity of the current
situation. Overall they not only underlined the crying need for
a determined class struggle with a goal of a socialist world,
they discussed with optimism the potential for that
struggle.
The Portuguese Marxist website, Resistir.info, and the
Portuguese magazine Vertice had called for the conference. It
had the support of other cultural institutions in Europe and
the Americas and of the municipalities of Serpa and nearby
Moura, about 150 miles east-southeast of Lisbon near the
Spanish border.
Among those participating were George Gastaud, Georges
Labica, Henri Alleg and Remy Herrera from the French left,
István Mészáros from Hungary--now in
Sussex, Britain, Cubans Isabel Monal and Iroel San chez, Nestor
Kohan from Argentina, from Chile Oscar Azocar, Brazilian
Umberto Martins, from Angola Carlos Belli-Bello and former
foreign minister Paolo Jorge, and, from the United States,
Brett Clark of Monthly Review and John Catalinotto of the
International Action Center.
From Portugal those presenting papers included Gen. Vasco
Gonçalves, who was prime minister in 1975, former member
of the Revolutionary Council Gen. Pezarat Correia, journalist
Carlos Lopes Pereira, Doctor Sergio Vinagre, Mayor Abilio
Fernandes of Evora, and from the Resistir. info team Jose
Gascao, economist Jorge Figuereido, Rui Namorada Rosa and
veteran revolutionary journalist and editor Miguel Urbano
Rodrigues.
Threats facing humanity
István Mészáros described the economic
crisis of imperialism as a "structural crisis," not one that
can be resolved by a cyclical economic upturn. "It is more like
the one that occurred after 1929," only resolved after the
enormous destruction of World War II. Mészáros
argued with ardor that capitalism's effects, in its current
phase, are destructive for human society and threaten the
planet itself, and that only a transition to a socialist
society can end this process.
Economist Jorge Figuereido described the probable exhaustion
of petroleum as the major energy source, with the likely peak
of production coming as early as 2008 and then continually
dwindling, while prices could triple to $125 a barrel by that
year. He argued that at this time any alternate sources of
energy, especially renewable sources, are unrealistic.
From Angola, MPLA leader Paolo Jorge described the difficult
economic choices facing the African continent and how
conditions of life for the masses of the people had
deteriorated under the neoliberal policies pushed by the
International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
Some of the Portuguese speakers, such as Gen.
Gonçalves on the national level and Mayor Fernandes on
the local level, spoke of the counter-revolutionary offensive
in Portugal that is threatening to remove all the tremendous
gains of the 1974-1975 revolution. They noted how the misnamed
Socialist Party has been the conduit by which imperialist
reaction has intervened in Portuguese society.
Many of the speakers called attention to the military threat
from imperialism, especially from U.S. imperialism. They
exposed the criminal character of the wars against Yugoslavia,
Afghanistan and Iraq and the blockade of Cuba, the threats
against the Bolivarian revolution in Vene zuela, and of
Washington's attempt to use its military might to assert
domination of the globe. They called this the "greatest threat
since Hitler's Germany unleashed World War II" on the world's
people.
The heroes of Iraq
But this aggression has already led to a serious problem for
the U.S. ruling class. Both Georges Labica and Miguel Urbano
pointed to the struggle of the Iraqi people against the
occupation as the first big setback for the imperialist plans.
Urbano spoke of the inability of the Pentagon to supply an army
large enough to control the situation in Iraq, let alone all
over the world.
Regarding the potential for developing a struggle worldwide,
Urbano said, "The objective conditions are favorable from the
moment in which the people of Iraq, in a resistance that
assumes the proportions of an insurrection aimed at driving out
the occupiers, arises as an expression of collective heroism,
struggling for all of humanity." Urbano also brought up the
struggles in Colombia and Venezuela and the determination of
the Cuban people to defend their socialist project, as other
challenges to U.S. imperialist domination.
In form the conference was, on a smaller scale, not much
different from the regional social forums. Unlike these,
however, this forum rejected any possibility of reforming world
imperialism, or of making globalization more humane, more
reasonable for the world's people. It considered the social
democratic and pacifist alternatives to be fantasy solutions at
best, and the struggle for socialism to be the only course that
can rescue humanity.
But this didn't mean abstaining from the social forums or
the anti-globalization strug gles. Prof. Isabel Monal of the
University of Havana urged those pro-communist and
pro-socialist groups that might be critical of the ideology of
the social forums to nevertheless "go there and participate,
take part in all the debates, win over the anti-globalization
movement to the class struggle."
In response to a comment, Monal again emphasized that "You
should take part in the debates and the struggles of those
youths. They will make mistakes. That is OK. They are involved
in the struggle for humanity."
Bringing the war home
In his contribution to the conference, John Catalinotto of
the International Action Center asked if it was possible for
the movement to break the ideological control that the U.S.
ruling class has on the masses at home. In answer to this
question, he discussed three areas that demonstrate the
potential for class struggle inside the United States.
These were "the anti-war movement and youth movement, as
shown by the week-long struggle at the Republican National
Convention; the growing tension inside the U.S. armed forces
with the potential for mass resistance, especially if a draft
is reintroduced; and the changing character of the working
class and its political expression in the Million Worker March
set now on Oct. 17."
Reprinted from the Oct. 7, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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