Pole of the Communist Revival in France
100th anniversary of the Soviet Union: Declaration of the Pole de Renaissance Communiste en France* on the occasion of the forum organised by the European Initiative of Communist Parties
25 November 2022
One hundred years ago, following the victory of the Red Army over Western imperialism allied with the "Whites", the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was proclaimed in Moscow.
The brutal semi-feudal tsarist Empire, vassal of the French-English imperialist Entente and inflicting the Great Russian hegemony on the "natives", was succeeded, in accordance with Lenin’s principles, by a union of X European, Caucasian and Asian socialist republics, all of them equal in rights, working for the construction of socialism and each one disposing of the sovereign right to withdraw from the Union, as a final safeguard clause. It is true that, in parallel to this, the Bolshevik Party, organised on the "Jacobin" principle of democratic centralism, set itself the task of ensuring the coherence of the Union on the basis of anti-imperialism, of the workers’ and peasants’ alliance and of an international struggle for communism led by the Comintern founded in 1919. For 70 years, with ups and downs that it is impossible to enumerate here, the USSR was the solid foundation of world peace, of anti-capitalist struggles, of the anti-imperialist fight, of women's emancipation, of the rejection of fascism, and of a worldwide surge of science and technology universally symbolised by the name of Gagarin. We should also mention the central role the Red Army played in defeating Nazism and, indirectly, in the social advances of the post-war period, including in several Western capitalist countries. The counter-revolutionary destruction of the GDR, the USSR and the socialist camp that occurred in the 1980s and 1990s as a result of complex phenomena that intertwined internal causes and external factors, in particular the enormous betrayal of a Gorbachev who was despised by his people but adulated by opportunists the world over, shows a contrario the enormous weight of the USSR in the world balance of forces between Labour and Capital, between oppressed peoples and imperialism, between Enlightenment and fundamentalist obscurantism, between the forces of life and the forces of fascist and exterminist death. So much so that the overall historically negative balance sheet is not that of the first socialist experiment in history, but that of its destruction by all the imperialists and renegades in the world. This is why the PRCF suggests to the communists of Europe to lead together a permanent offensive campaign against the ignoble Resolution voted by the so-called "European Parliament" which even pretends to ban the workers’ and peasants’ symbol of the hammer and sickle on the whole European territory: For its part, the PRCF will commemorate the 80th anniversary of Stalingrad in the streets on 4 February, but it proposes that the communists of Europe display everywhere, under the nose of the fascist imperialist EU-NATO and its governments nostalgic for Hitler, Bandera and Mussolini, the workers' and peasants' "tools" every 7 November and every 2 February of the years to come!
In these conditions, it is advisable to be more offensive than ever in the defence of the historical balance sheet of the USSR and of this world anti-Hitler camp centred on the USSR which Dimitrov called for when, analysing before the Vllth Congress of the Communist International (1935) the terrible defeat of the German and Italian communists and the salutary rise to power of the Popular Front led by the French communists at the call of Thorez and Duclos, it called for the building everywhere, nationally and globally, of broad anti-fascist fronts fusing patriotic commitment, popular struggle, the defence of democratic freedoms and the protection of world peace, placing the working class and its communist vanguard at the head of the anti-Hitler struggle. Not only did this mass line not mean renouncing socialism, but it was by placing the world of labour at the centre of the patriotic and popular fronts and of the Great Anti-Fascist Coalition centred on the USSR that Hitlerism was swept away and that, at the end of the Second World War, socialism made giant strides in Europe, that the communists became hegemonic on the left in France and in Italy, while, in turn, the Czechoslovak, Chinese, Korean, Cuban and Vietnamese CPs took power in Prague, Peking, Pyongyang, Cuba and Hanoi, making the communists the standard- bearers of patriotic, anti-fascist and anti-colonial struggles carried through to the end, i.e. to the socialist revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
In other forms, this vital commitment to placing communists at the head of broad proletarian, popular, pacifist, patriotic, anti-fascist and even environmentalist fronts is more relevant than ever. As US imperialism and its European vassals desperately seek to save their shattered global hegemony while staving off the systemic crisis of capitalism with war, it is vital for all of us to "hold all ends of the chain":
1°) it would seem to us erroneous, in the face of the world war that threatens, to send back to back, on the one hand, Euro-Atlantic imperialism and its epigones, German imperialism in the midst of rearmament and dreaming of revenge for Stalingrad, but also French imperialism, which is all the more aggressive because it is losing its foothold in its ex-African pre-squares, and on the other hand, the Russian Federation and the People's Republic of China which, on their respective margins of the working-class Donbass as well as in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Tibet and Sinkiang, are threatened with a neo-colonial type of repartition. Let's repeat that transatlantic imperialism wants to prevent its structural weakening through war, not only in the face of the BRICS, which make up almost the majority of humanity, but also in the face of Africa, Indonesia, India, Latin America and the so-called Arab-Muslim masses of the great Mediterranean Arc, of which Palestine is the focal point, to these 7 billion human beings who have been humiliated for too long and who will not endure forever the arrogance of the Anglo-Saxon and Euro-Atlantic masters, of their stock market "values" and of their suffocating domination on all levels, financial, monetary, military, technological, musical and even linguistic.
The question is not only whether there is a Russian imperialism, because if there is, it would not solve the question of who is the main instigator of the oppression in Donbass and the war in Ukraine. Already at the 7th Congress of the C.I., George Dimitrov noted that it was not enough that England, France and Hitler's Germany were all three imperialist states to send them back to back with Germany as it was very right to do in 1914: The Comintern rightly declared that in the coming conflict the revengeful Third Reich would be the main war-maker and that it was therefore necessary to take a clear anti-fascist line against it nationally and internationally, a line which was fully corroborated by subsequent events.
Moreover, even if we were to declare Russia imperialist today, this would not change anything in practice with regard to the duty of Western communists, particularly French communists in our case: it remains to fight Western imperialism in the first place, of which the Macron regime is a subordinate cog, recalling Liebknecht's words: "the main enemy is in your country". This is all the more true that in the dynamic of the conflict that opposes the EU-NATO allied with the pro-Nazi regime in Kiev to the Russian state supported by the workers' Donbass and by the overwhelming majority of Russian communists, the Euro- Atlanticists, friends of Zielensky, are led to symbolically lean on the horrific memory of the Bandera genocide. Conversely, their enemies, including Putin unwillingly, are forced to allow statues of Lenin to be put up again and to exploit, however inconsistently, the red symbolism of the Great Patriotic War. But that is THEIR contradiction, not ours!
2°) This observation that Euro-Atlanticism allied with the neo-Nazis is the main enemy of peace does not imply any politico-ideological alignment with Putin's Bonapartist and counter-revolutionary regime. Not only is the PRCF not in solidarity with Putin in Russia, not only does it give modest humanitarian and political support to the communist workers of Donbass, but our comrade, the philosopher Georges Gastaud, has publicly questioned Putin about his attacks on Lenin, described as a traitor to Russia, and on the right to exist of a Soviet Ukraine with the right to self-determination. It is so obvious that these anti-communist and basically anti-Soviet tirades are the worst way to federate Russian patriotism, to detach from Zelensky the non-fascist Ukrainian elements, to revive the great patriotic and communist impulse of the patriotic war symbolised by the red flag with the "tools". How much stronger would the resistance to US hegemony be if these forces, instead of denigrating Lenin, Soviet federalism and the communists, referred not to the "Russian world" and the Holy Russian Orthodox Church, but to the free Union of the fifteen sister republics fighting together, under the authority of the proletariat, against the Nazi invader and for the internationalist ideal of communism!
3°) We should perhaps also assume even more the properly vital dimension of communist commitment at a time when contemporary capitalism-imperialism is aggravating its exterminist features on all levels; Indeed, the maintenance of the obsolete capitalist mode of production puts humanity, and even the continuity of life on Earth, in mortal danger, whether in the military field, where imperialist domination deprived of the Soviet counterweight translates into the march towards a potentially nuclear world war from the Baltic to the Black Sea and from Taiwan to Korea, not to mention the ever-increasing threats against Cuba, Bolivia or Venezuela. This exterminism also translates into maximum irresponsibility in the environmental field, which verifies Marx's words that "capitalism generates wealth only by exhausting its two sources, the earth and the worker". This is why it is necessary, around the socialist countries, the communist parties, the working class in struggle, but by federating somewhat all those who want in time, without political coldness, to stop the escalation towards world war, including those who make a false analysis of the Ukrainian conflict but who simply want to ward off the annihilation of humanity in the event of the rocket-nuclear spiral being triggered, because today we are undoubtedly even closer to an unprecedented conflagration than we were in 1962 in connection with Berlin and Cuba, or than we were in 1984 during the implantation of American Euro missiles in Germany! Not only would the call for a broad "world front of reason" that Andropov called for in 1985 not diminish communist and proletarian influence, but it would split the warmongering front formed by Biden, Johnson, Baerboke and Co. and highlight as never before Fidel's and Che's righteous slogan "socialism or die, we will win": for in the final analysis, the best response to capitalist exterminism is socialist revolution and the revolutionary advent of a new generation of socialism-communism.
4°) For all that, the best response to the war, as well as to the march towards a "European federal state" wanted by Scholz, which is the other name of the Euro- Atlantic Empire that the fascist EU is becoming, is above all the rise of the internationalist struggle of the proletariat. Already in 1914 Lenin called for "transforming the imperialist war into a revolutionary civil war of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie". This main antagonism of modern capitalist society is so little overshadowed by the counter-hegemonic struggles that it is in India that the biggest strikes in history have just taken place on the initiative of the communists of that country. In Britain, courageous red trade unionists, including real Marxist-Leninists whom we salute, are building a great class movement against the Tories. In France, the refinery and energy working class has recently come close to blocking the country, and indeed the logistics of the whole of Western Europe, and the powers that be fear the junction between the red flags of the organised proletariat and the Yellow Vests demanding popular sovereignty. More and more the WFTU is scoring points and class unions members of the CGT are taking up the PRCF slogan "yellow, yellow, yellow, the ETUC is yellow! Red, red, red, the WFTU is red! More and more it is necessary that the real communists, without ever losing sight of the strategic objective of the socialist revolution in the ultimate perspective of communism, carry among the masses a
sharp line, clearly opposed to Euro-reformism and Euro-Trotskyism which shelters the EU behind great hollow generalist watchwords, a strategy based on the total rupture with the EU, this prison of the peoples aligned on NATO, on the euro, this continental anti-labour device, on NATO, It is in the framework of a sharp class confrontation of the working people with the Euro-Atlantic oligarchy, by dialectically articulating the struggle for national independence, for peace, for social progress and socialism, that the working class will regain its leading role within the broad masses and that it will thus be able, in practice and not only in words, to reopen to the people of France the path to its second revolution, a socialist revolution.
May the inspiring example of Lenin, the October Revolution, the Workers' and Peasants' Soviets and the Great Patriotic War against Nazism live on in our struggles. Down with the EU and NATO, which are responsible for world war and fascisation! Long live the rebirth of the International Communist Movement on a Marxist-Leninist basis!