Deep roots of WWP’s internationalism

John Catalinotto WW photo: G. Dunkel

Workers World Party’s history of international solidarity has its roots in a time when, though we were the strongest defenders of the Soviet Union against imperialism, we were isolated from the world communist movement centered in Moscow. We were happy on the occasions our work was recognized, as when North Vietnamese President Ho Chi Minh in 1963 recognized the role of Youth Against War and Fascism [WWP’s youth organization] in initiating demonstrations to get the U.S. out of Vietnam.

Our party chairperson Sam Marcy and the other leaders not only insisted that the party youth put international solidarity in action, they set the example by disrupting the United Nations in solidarity with Lumumba’s Congo in 1960. We marched in Times Square to say “Hands off Cuba” in 1962, held a public meeting to defend the Indonesian communists who were being slaughtered in 1965, and were the only ones to picket at the U.N. to protest the June 1967 U.S.-Israeli war.

Whether these actions won recognition or temporarily isolated us, we learned this was what we had to do if we wanted to think of ourselves as revolutionaries.

Today, there is no single international center to the movement. The workers’ movement is only beginning to recover from the disappearance of the USSR. But the world economic crisis forces it to recover. Our party has both the responsibility and the opportunity to play an important role, simply because we are located in the center of world imperialism. What we do here is magnified 100 times.

Proletarian internationalism is in our hearts. Only now our actions go over the Internet to the world. How we wish we could have done that with Comrade Sam Marcy’s writings.

This past year, for example, our WW articles have been sent all over the world. Besides those we publish in English and Spanish, some are translated to Arabic, French, Portuguese, Spanish and Russian, and sometimes Chinese, posted on websites and read by communists and class-conscious workers.

We also actively fight against Washington’s war drive. Our record of consistent anti-imperialist positions in the entire post-Soviet period has established us as a reliable ally of all anti-imperialist and national liberation struggles worldwide.

We participate in solidarity trips to Cuba to break the blockade, such as the FIST trip last year or the Venceremos Brigade or the Pastors for Peace campaigns. We take part in tribunals in Colombia against the state and the transnational corporations, and the tribunal on Israeli War Crimes in Lebanon. We help organize the Tijuana labor conference that takes place each December.

Some of the recent international conferences we’ve had delegations at are mainly for discussion and exchange of ideas—this year in Mexico City at the Workers Party meeting, in Havana for the Marxism discussion, the recent gathering of Artists and Intellectuals in Defense of Humanity in Caracas, among others.

To promote joint actions, we have recently participated in the meeting of the International League of Peoples Struggle in Hong Kong, and also of an allied movement of migrant workers, and we helped set up the International Anti-Imperialist Peoples Struggle Coordinating Committee at a meeting in Kolkata, West Bengal, last December. In January, this group will be part of a larger forum in Beirut that should represent the interests of the resistance movements of the Middle East and anti-imperialist forces elsewhere.

We could not expect a new international to exist without a new revolutionary upsurge. Yet these organizations can create a framework for solidarity in struggle.

The transnational corporations have organized production internationally. The imperialist ruling class has the IMF and NATO to oversee its interests. The workers and oppressed deserve their own international coordination.

The party can only earn its revolutionary reputation by fighting the class and national struggle here at home, but it will do it with organizers who have trained their brain and muscle, by habit and by understanding, with an internationalism that makes no move without considering the interests of the most oppressed of the world.