Fadi Kassem | Pole Of Communist Revival In France (PRCF); Georges Gastaud | Initiative Communiste (IC), France; Boris Differ | Pole Of Communist Revival In France (PRCF)
Confronted with the continental conflict fomented by the EU- NATO in Ukraine (the 2014 Euro-Maidan coup d’état instigated by the United States, which did not hesitate to support the Ukrainian Nazis of Pravy Sektor, Aïdar and Azov for this; cynically claimed torpedoing of the Minsk Agreements by A. Merkel and F. Hollande …), as well as the anti-Chinese provocations of the US Navy in the Indo-Pacific area, the parties which, in France and throughout the world, claim to be communist and/ or anti-imperialist have basically had a choice between three types of positioning since 24 February 2022:
– either, as Fabien Roussel ventured in the name of the P “C”F, linked to the Party of the European Left, demonise Russia and China and vote in Parliament (on 29.11.2022) for Macron’s arms deliveries to the Ukrainian regime nostalgic for Hitler’s Stépan Bandera;
– or take refuge in an uncompromising ni-ni position (“neither NATO, nor Russia!”) and evade the obligation incumbent on all serious anti-imperialists, and a fortiori on all communists, to give priority to fighting the imperialism of their own country (“the main enemy is in your country”, as the heroic German socialist Karl Liebknecht said in August 1914);
– or, as the PRCF did from the outset, denounce the EU-NATO Axis as the main enemy of the peoples and of world peace. In fact, the real aim of the alliance between the EU, NATO and the Ukrainian ultra-right in power is in no way to “restore the unity of Ukraine”, but to preserve, at the cost of a world war with a nuclear component if necessary, the shaky global hegemony of the dollar and the US Army in the face of the great emerging countries of China, Russia, India, Brazil and South Africa.
Faced with an ultra-predatory and “unilateralist” Euro- Atlanticist logic which is strangling the world on every level (economic, military, environmental, even linguistic and cultural), communists and all other consistent anti-imperialists must support any effort to loosen the deadly, indeed frankly fascist and exterminist, planetary stranglehold imposed on humanity by the Euro-Atlantic Axis. Indeed, to claim to be able to bring down all the capitalist or partially capitalist countries on the planet at once, indiscriminately and in the same way, is to ignore the fact that, as Mao showed, there are “principal contradictions” and “secondary contradictions”, or, as Lenin wrote, that
“A more powerful enemy can only be defeated at the cost of an extreme tension of forces and on the express condition that the slightest “crack” between enemies is used in the most meticulous, careful, circumspect and intelligent way, the slightest opposition of interests between the bourgeoisies of the different countries, between the different groups or categories of the bourgeoisie within each country, as well as the possibility of securing a numerically strong ally, even if it were a temporary, shaky, conditional, unsound and insecure ally. Anyone who has not understood this truth has understood nothing of Marxism, or of contemporary scientific socialism in general … ”,
… it is to commit a fatal strategic error leading, on the one hand, to the isolation of proletarian forces and, on the other, to the unification against them of all the non- proletarian forces on the planet. In the final analysis, this fails to grasp the ABCs of any politico-military strategy: isolate the main enemy in order to bring it down first, while at the same time uniting as many forces as possible around the proletariat, the spearhead of any anti- imperialist struggle fought to the end. Those who still do not understand this should reread, not only Lenin (“Left- Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder), not only George Dimitrov (“Report to the 7th Congress of the Communist International”), but also Pierre Corneille’s tragedy Horace: the Roman warrior Horace, forced to face three Albanian warriors alone, ends up eliminating all three by fighting them, not all together at the same time, but by dividing them up and killing them one after the other in different places!
This clear priority commitment to opposing the EU- NATO axis in no way implies idealising V. Putin’s regime. This bourgeois regime, which grew out of the anti-Soviet counter-revolution led by Gorbachev and Yeltsin in the 1980s and 90s, carved up the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in the name of a supposed “great reconciliation” between the future prosperous “post-communist” Russia and the “gentle” West. As if the implosion of the European socialist camp were likely to change (if not aggravate!) the hyper-predatory nature of the Washington-led Euro-Atlantic empire and the despotic, militaristic EU led by resurgent German imperialism!
This is why, on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of Stalingrad which it organised on 4 February 2023 in defiance of the Ukrainian fascists swarming Paris, the PRCF invited a Russian Communist MP, comrade Vladimir Bessonov, to address the French directly. Although he unequivocally supports Russia’s patriotic effort to break the agonising political, military and commercial encirclement by the Atlantic forces which threatens it from the Baltic to the Far East via the Black Sea, Bessonov is nonetheless a determined political opponent of the bourgeois rulers who periodically humiliate communists the world over by veiling Lenin’s mausoleum every 9 May on the anniversary of Victory. Quite simply, communists everywhere must make a clear distinction, while intelligently articulating them, between politico-ideological class solidarity with the other workers’ parties of the world (from Korea to Venezuela, via India and Greece), and the “military support” owed to any state, and to any political force, including patriotic-bourgeois, daring to defy the very “globalitarian” Euro-Atlantic Empire in the making.
This denunciation of the EU-NATO as the main enemy of the peoples of the world and of world peace is also a patriotic duty towards our country, France, which is still capitalist and imperialist, but still partly heir to the secular-democratic achievements of Robespierre’s Jacobin Revolution and the social advances bequeathed by the Communist ministers of 1945, and which is being destroyed by the forced march of the European oligarchies towards the anti-social, fascist and anti- national “European federal state” sought by the Washington-Brussels-Berlin Axis and accepted by French imperialism, which is all the more aggressive and vassalized because it is in rapid decline from the Middle East to West Africa.
In this spirit of anti-imperialist unity, the PRCF participates, among other forums, in the important Caracas Anti-Imperialist Platform. It nonetheless supports the CP of Venezuela and all other Marxist parties, expressing the need for Leninist forces specifically at the service of the proletariat to play their inalienable role. As we can see, “military” support for the World Anti-Imperialist Front which is being reconstituted—even if it is partly non-proletarian, and therefore somewhat inconsistent and zigzagging— in no way prevents the Communist parties from holding discussions with all the sister parties of the world which wish to maintain egalitarian relations with each other, excluding any temptation to interfere or excommunicate. This unreserved support for the broadest anti-imperialist front goes dialectically hand in hand with the need for the Communists to win the leading role (not through arrogant pronouncements but through the practical demonstration of the anti- imperialist dynamism of Communist militants) in the world battle against imperialism and hegemonism. Not out of a spirit of domination, but because capitalism is objectively the fertile womb denounced by Brecht, from which periodically emerges the foul beast of fascism and exterminism.
Without confusing them, without dissolving the International Communist Movement (ICM) into the emerging World Anti-Imperialist Front, as the advocates of a Fifth International without a defined class identity are wrongly urging us to do; without, on the other hand, reducing the Anti-Imperialist Front to a handful of Communist Parties cultivating a purist entre- soi(*phenomenon sticking to its own little society— Ed.) which excludes from the anti-imperialist and anti- exterminist struggle the billions of human beings, and in particular the members of the world’s popular youth, who want to live and live better but who have not yet been won over to Marxism; we must articulate the reconstruction of the International Communist Movement (ICM) with the reconstruction of the ICM (and why not, when the time comes, the indispensable new Communist International?) on a strictly Marxist and proletarian basis, to the building of the broadest anti-imperialist front. This in no way prevents us from campaigning so that the communists win, or rather, so that they deserve to win through their anti-imperialist commitment and their ability to federate, a role of impetus and political vanguard in what Yuri Andropov once called the “Front for Life” or the “Front of Reason”.
This, moreover, was the highly dialectical and mobilising lesson of the Seventh Congress of the Communist International, at equal distance from the sectarianism of some and the unbridled opportunism of others. For the working class, whose struggles are now resuming everywhere (India, France, Great Britain, the United States), is alone in being able to bring to a successful conclusion—the world triumph of socialism on the road to communism—a consistent struggle to bring down imperialism without return and prevent the defeat of one imperialism from serving only to promote the rival imperialism in the end.
