Emergency Euro-Mediterranean Encounter Final Resolution: Fight imperialism and war with the international socialist revolution! Forward to the revolutionary International!
Fight imperialism and war with the international socialist revolution!
Forward to the revolutionary International!
1. The Trump Doctrine “Make America Great Again” is a Declaration of War against the European Union, Russia, China, Iran, and the rest of the world-including, finally, America itself.
This became crystal clear, even among the most skeptic, with the US President’s last trip in Europe on July 11-16, 2018, which aptly was described as “five days of diplomatic carnage”.
Landing in Brussels Airport, on July 11, to attend to the NATO Summit, Trump announced an escalation of the trade war against China by imposing another $200 billion tariffs added to the previous $50 billion already decided and/or under way. At the same time, he insulted Angela Merkel and Germany to be “captives of Russia” because of German participation in the North Stream II pipeline project; then he threatened the entire Atlantic Alliance with a US withdraw if the NATO members do not double their contribution in military expenditures.
Visiting Britain, after the NATO crisis Summit, Trump meddled in the British government crisis by insulting Prime Minister Theresa May for her plan for “a soft Brexit”. He praised her opponent Boris Johnson who had just resigned as Foreign Minister in protest on the Brexit question as “an excellent future Prime Minister”. He also blackmailed May by stating that a US-UK trade deal was conditional upon a hard Brexit (a statement that he later typically retracted).Furthermore, through an attack against the first Muslim Mayor of London, of Pakistani origins, Trump launched a far right xenophobic and racist offensive against immigration in Europe, accusing it as responsible for the rise of...criminality!
Before leaving Britain to meet Putin in Helsinki, in an interview for CBS, Trump declared that “the European Union is a foe” to the US, as well as are Russia, China or Iran!
Last but not at all least, his performance in the Press Conference, after a closed doors, one to one, meeting with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki on July 16, attacking the US intelligence services’ investigations and all his opponents back home, provoked chaos and sharpened the regime crisis within the US State itself...
2. Donald Trump is not just an isolated case of an insane, “pluto-populist”, bourgeois politician. He is the symptom of a senile capitalist system in decay in the United States and worldwide. He is the most emblematic case of a lunacy that has gripped the imperialist countries that searches the solution to the irresolvable contradictions of capital on the world stage in an aggressive retrenchment to the national sphere, based on the search for domination on the world market for the single nations in question. The extreme right movements that are on the rise all around the Western nations, in particular France, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Italy, Denmark etc. are expressions of the same urge to give primacy to “their” national way out at the expense of their erstwhile “allies” and “partners” rather than a common solution for the capitalist world in its totality. Trump’s “America first” becomes “prima gli Italiani” with Salvini. The highest point reached by the historical development of world capitalism is the US and now it has become the highest expression of the world crisis. The social landscape has become appalling– huge inequalities between the 1 per cent and the rest, stagnation of workers income for 40 years, extremely precarious labor, debts, no public health system worth the name. For the first time since the industrial revolution, an advanced capitalist country- the most advanced and powerful capitalist country- shows in 2016 a decline of the national average life expectancy.
From its rise to world hegemony, the US could not have an internal equilibrium without controlling the contradictions of the world capitalist economy and politics. The explosion of all globalized capitalist contradictions, manifested in the insoluble world crisis after 2007, had its starting point and center in America. It became during the last decade the driving force that brutally disintegrates all the international world order, producing an exacerbation of all international rivalries and social clashes, between countries and within every country.
Capital Globalization, hailed as the “end of history” after the demise of the Soviet Union, reached its historical limits itself, trapped into an impasse, which cannot be superseded without superseding the capital system itself. The defensive tendency to return to the restricted limits of a Nation-State is futile in today’s conditions of international interconnectedness of social economic and political life, far more advanced than in the 1930s. The dangerous rise of nationalism and protectionism, poisoning social economic life and politics, feeding xenophobia, racism, and fascism, exacerbates the crisis, being totally unable to solve it. Socialization of production on a world scale has reached such a point that failure to cope with that socialization leads to further disintegration.
The European Union and the Eurozone entered an irreversible process of decomposition (manifested in the European banking system’s insolvency, Greece’s bankruptcy, Brexit, now Salvini’s Italy, the failure of Macron’s proposals to repair the damaged German-French axis and the paralysis of the weak German ruling coalition, the clash between Northern and Southern Europe, between Central-Eastern Europe and the Western European countries etc.).
Trump’s America downsized the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), is threatening Canada and Mexico with dissolution of NAFTA, and is accelerating the disintegration of the EU, even the existence of NATO is put under question.
The old imperialist order imposed by the Sykes-Picot Agreement during the First World War in the Middle East has disappeared long ago, with the imperialist wars and wars by proxy that destroyed Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Syria, particularly in an attempt to stop the Arab revolutions of 2011.
3. The escalating international trade war between America, Europe, Russia, and China is intensifying the imperialist war drive everywhere. From the war volcano of Middle East to the Balkans and the Eastern borderlands of Europe in Ukraine, from the Caucasus to Central Asia to the South China Sea and Korea, imperialism is already in confrontation, directly or indirectly, with Russia and China to fragment and re-colonize them, absorbing them in world capitalism. Working class and popular movements cannot be neutral in this confrontation, which threatens humanity and every living being on Earth with world war and nuclear extinction:we declare war against the imperialist war of re-colonization of Russia and China, without supporting or cultivating any illusions in the restorationist Bonapartist elites in Kremlin or Beijing. Expropriate the oligarchs, the fifth column of global capital! All power to genuine Soviets- workers councils! For a revolutionary socialist renewal of the lands of the Russian and Chinese Octobers!
4. The 4th Euro-Mediterranean Conference in May 2017 had emphasized the implications of the first trip of Trump outside the US in Saudi Arabia and Israel: the formation of a pro-imperialist war axis of Israel, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Sudan aimed against Iran and its allies in the region, first of all Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Syrian regime of Bashar al Assad.
Inescapably the first target and victim of such an unholy alliance is the Palestinian people, their rights of national self determination, including the right to Return of all Palestinian refugees.
One year later, this prognosis has been confirmed, and the imperialist aggression is in full deployment, making necessary this Emergency Euro-Mediterranean Encounter at the end of July 2018. Crucial interrelated steps of imperialist aggression’s escalation are: Trump’s decision to tear the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran to pieces; the provocation to transfer the US Embassy in Jerusalem on the eve of the anniversary of the 1948 Nakbah; the massacre of the Gaza Palestinian people’s unarmed March of Return by the Zionist army; the voted racist Basic Law of the Zionist State as “the National homeland of [only]the Jewish people” destroying the already limited rights of the Palestinian Arab citizens, legalizing segregation according to ethnicity and religion, and restricting even the democratic freedoms of the Israeli Jews.
At the center of this counter-revolutionary strategy to impose a new imperialist order in the region, to replace the ruined old Sykes-Picot settlement, is the infamous “Kushner Plan” pompously praised by his father-in-law Trump as “the Great Deal of the Century”. Behind the tandem Trump-Netanyahu, Kushner, the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed of the United Arab Emirates, with the support of the Egyptian dictator al Sisi, want to literally bribe the Palestinian bourgeois authorities to abandon any Palestinian claim for national independence in exchange for infrastructure investments in the West Bank and even Gaza, new jobs for the impoverished population and money for the local Quisling authorities, funded by the Gulf monarchies.
5. Burying the Palestinian Question, they hope to open the road to attack what they consider as their main peril, Iran. The central question is not the nuclear and missile programs. As Pompeo and Bolton publicly stressed, what really separates the US from Iran is the Iranian Revolution of 1979. For this reason the US blame Iran as the source of every revolutionary anti-imperialist upsurge in the region, and they support by every means the genocidal war of Saudi Arabia and the UAE in Yemen.
To bring their plans into fruition they need the collaboration of the Putin regime to bring out of Syria the Iranian military forces and the Lebanese Hezbollah, the latter being the only military force in the Middle East that defeated the Israeli Army in 2006. The promised exchange would be the acceptance by Israel of the continuation of Bashar al Assad’s rule in Damascus, on the basis of the 1974 agreement of separation of forces in the Golan area, signed by his father Hafez al Assad, and above all a US-Russian agreement on Ukraine, to end Western sanctions against Russia. The recent visits by Netanyahu and of Ali Akbar Velayati in Moscow, on the eve of the Helsinki July 16 meeting, are directly linked to this burning issue.
6. An Israeli-Saudi led war against Iran is far from an easy task for the aggressors. Saudi Arabia and the UAE, with their strong armies, high military technology, spending billions of dollars, have been unable, for longer than three years now, to crash the Houthi rebels in devastated Yemen, the poorest country in the region. Iran is a huge country, marked by its anti-Shah popular revolution, uncompleted and distorted, and its people, who, despite all the social sufferings from the sanctions and its grievances vis-a-vis the Tehran theocratic regime, is not at all ready to capitulate to imperialism. For the moment the clash of Israel with Iranian forces is waged in Syria’s soil and airspace.
No negotiations and mutual concessions with imperialism can bring any lasting peace in Syria and the Middle East, or prevent, in the long run, even a military aggression against Russia itself.
The biggest barrier with which the warmongers are confronted now are the impoverished popular masses, the workers, the urban poor, the fellahin, and above all the younger generation of the oppressed. In a recent report, the IMF warned that the social causes of the revolutionary “Arab Spring” of 2011, with youth unemployment at the center, despite the provisional setback, imperialist aggression, civil wars, and military coups, are still present and reignited by the deepening of the world crisis.
The evidence is clear with the non-stop rebellions, in 2018, of jobless youth, of workers and urban poor revolting against poverty and austerity in the Middle East and North Africa, in Tunisia, Morocco, Iran, Jordan, Iraq...
Even in Israel, thousands of Israeli Jews have mobilized against the new apartheid Nation State Law.
In Gaza too, at the forefront of the Great March of Return, there is a new generation of Palestinian fighters, boys and girls, by-passing in large numbers the traditional Palestinian political organizations, both secular and Islamist, attempting sometimes even to establish contact with Israeli peace activists from the other side of the fence. They are the hope for the future. To win, they need a strategy, organization, a perspective and program, a really revolutionary leadership to replace the old bourgeois elites that capitulated to Zionism, imperialism, and the Arab reactionary monarchs and dictators.
An international combat front is needed throughout the region and beyond to strengthen and march together with the rising revolutionary forces, in political independence from the local bourgeois elites and imperialism, in fighting solidarity with the Palestinian, Arab, Iranian, Kurdish and all oppressed peoples.
Imperialists out of Syria, Yemen, and the entire Middle East! Down with Zionism, full support to the national rights of the Palestinian people, including its right to Return! For a free, secular, socialist Palestine in a Socialist Federation of the free peoples of the Middle East!
7. The discovery of huge gas deposits in the Eastern Mediterranean and the new energy transfer roads to the Balkans and Europe have already become a dangerous apple of discord and a focus of conflict between competing multinational companies, antagonistic imperialist interests and rival regional powers. The threat of an expansion of the war from the Middle Eastern volcano to the Balkans and Europe is immediate.
The tensions and bellicose rhetoric between Greece, Cyprus and Turkey are rising.
Erdogan’s Turkey, already involved in war operations against the Kurdish people in Syria and Iraq, challenges the 1923 Lausanne Treaty and nurtures neo-Ottoman illusions in the region. The deepening of the political crisis after the 2016 attempted coup against Erdogan, the frictions with the US, EU and NATO, and the impact of the worsening world capitalist crisis on the over-indebted Turkish economy and the lira intensify the regional rivalries with Greece on Cyprus and the Aegean.
From the other side, in the economically bankrupted and socially devastated Greece, sections of the ruling class and the pseudo-left government of Syriza in coalition with the far right nationalists of Independent Greeks is trying to find a way out by joining the aggressive plans of US and NATO imperialists in the region. The Tsipras government has already formed and is participating in an alliance with Netanyahu’s Israel, the Cyprus of the right-wing Anastasiades, and the Egyptian dictatorship of al Sisi to share parts of the profits of the new gas deposits. Regularly, they participate in joint military operationsand exercises in the region. The stated ambition of the Greek bourgeoisie and of its pseudo-left government is to transform Greece into a regionally hegemonic “Israel of the Balkans”. It is a lunacy of the rulers, a nightmare for the Greek people itself, and a recipe for a historic disaster.
A military confrontation between Greece and Turkey will be a totally reactionary war from both sides and a catastrophe for both the Greek and the Turkish peoples, which are victims already of the devastating effects of the capitalist crisis.
On both sides of the Aegean, Greek and Turkish workers and the poor have to unite and fight by mass mobilizations, international solidarity and revolutionary means to stop the reactionary war drive, the common threatening catastrophe. If this crime takes place, both peoples have toturn the reactionary war of the rulers into a social revolution of the exploited and oppressed against all the oppressors. The main enemy, the ruling capitalist class, is within our respective countries- and it has to be overthrown. Our common future depends on militant internationalism and international Socialism!
In relation to the occupied and divided Cyprus, all imperialist plans and machinations, advanced by the UN that perpetuate, in other forms, the division of the island and the presence of imperialist bases and foreign troops (British, Turkish, Greek, UN,) have to be rejected. For a united socialist Cyprus of the Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot workers and poor peasants!
8. The willing collaboration of the Greek government with NATO’s initiative, supported by the EU, for an arrangement between Athens and Skopje on the 27 year- old dispute on the name of the Republic of Macedonia, to end the Greek veto and allow this tiny Balkan country to join these two imperialist alliances, led to the Zaev-Tsipras agreement of June 17, 2018.
This agreement promoted by the US, NATO and the EU already has put once again the powder keg of Greek and Balkan nationalism on fire, exploited by fascists, the Right, the military and the Church. The anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist forces, without stopping fighting these reactionary forces, without any concession to nationalism, with a right wing or “left” cover, have to reject the Euro-NATO Zaev-Tsipras agreement.
It cannot bring peace but war. NATO, the aggressor that destroyed by a barbaric war of aggression Yugoslavia to be replaced by an archipelago of impotent protectorates, including the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, cannot bring but new disasters. Its pressure to solve the so-called “name dispute” was driven by its need to establish a military base in Macedonia to complete the encirclement of Russia. With Macedonia joining NATO the Vardar River valley can be used to transfer, easily and rapidly, troops from the Piraeus harbor to the interior of the Balkans.
It cannot bring fraternity among the peoples but fratricidal conflict and nationalist frenzy-as already we can see by the chauvinistic mobilizations led by the most counter-revolutionary forces.
It cannot bring freedom to the people but rule by the enemies of freedom and fascists.
Against the entry of the Republic of Macedonia to NATO and the EU,we defend the freedom and the right of national self-determination of the Macedonian people to name its country as it chooses. No other nation or State, including Greece has any right to impose its name to another nation.
We defend freedom and equality to all Balkan peoples, to all oppressed ethnic and religious minorities in the Peninsula, including to the Macedonian ethnic minority in Greece.
We have to make ours again the slogan of the anti-fascist socialist revolution in Yugoslavia, Albania, and Greece during the Nazi occupation of the Balkans: Death to fascism! Freedom to the people!
And furthermore, ours should be, against the Great Powers’ domination and against the local chauvinistic ruling classes, in line with the dream of the 15th century communist Bedreddin in uniting the Balkan peoples across race and religion and the strategic goal of Rigas, and later of Christian Rakovsky and of all revolutionaries in the Balkans: for a Socialist Federation of the free Balkan peoples!
9. The geo-strategic importance of the Balkans cannot be underestimated, as they are situated at the doors of Europe to the Middle East and in the underbelly of Russia, at the crossroads of all international contradictions and antagonisms.
It became many times in history the battlefield of wars, national and international. Now, they are a field of new war preparations, and the dangerous entry to Europe for the multitudes of refugees/migrants, the victims of imperialist war and devastation in the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa.
The real culprits of the tragedy, the Western imperialist brigands and aggressors, have built a “Fortress Europe” to prevent their victims to find refuge from certain death. The Evros River, the Aegean and the Mediterranean have been transformed into a graveyard for thousands of innocent men, women, children and old people.
The EU closed the so called Western Balkan road in 2016, signed the infamous deal with Erdogan’s Turkey, and established an archipelago of “hot spots”, of concentration camps for those trapped in Greece and elsewhere, under the most inhuman conditions. A continent of 511 million people finds impossible to receive one million refugees from Syria, when the small Lebanon, with a population of less than 5 million, has received 1 million and Jordan 3 million refugees…
The anti-immigrant hysteria not only in Central-Eastern Europe but also in Austria, Germany, France, Britain, Italy etc. is changing the political map in Europe, driving the rise of far right and fascistoid forces into leading positions in governments and/or the Opposition. The fake term “populism” is used conveniently, for the ruling class, to cover up the real social-political nature of the phenomenon and its material roots. In the last instance, it is the disintegration process of the EU produced by the world capitalist crisis and the implosion of capital globalization that drives the emergence of economic and political nationalism, centrifugal forces, State authoritarianism- and profitable production of scapegoats personified in the refugees, all minorities, and the weakest layers of society.
Now, after the election of the racist far right government in Italy, the Central Mediterranean path has been closed too. The EU summit in June 2018 was unable even to reform the infamous Dublin Treaty and only decided to establish for refugees hellish “disembarkation camps” outside the EU, mainly among the warlords and slavery markets of destroyed Libya.
This is undoubtedly a definitive proof for the advanced decay of civilization in Europe- similar to the crime of separation of Mexican and other Latino kids from their mothers by the Trump barbarism.
The anti-immigrant poison enters, unfortunately, also in the ranks of the left, which in its parliamentary reformist forms proved unable to repel the danger and in some case contributed to the rise of nationalism, xenophobia and racism.
The working class cannot be emancipated without acting as a universal class: to liberate itself it has to liberate all the oppressed in society. The refugees/migrants are not “competitors” but victims in the same labor market ruled by capital. It is capital that destroys jobs, wages, pensions, workers’ social rights across the spectrum, not its victims, the refugees. It is the imperialism of the European powers and the United States that has created in the first place the material conditions of the extreme inequality between the peoples of the imperialist countries and the wretched of the earth. The workers and popular movements in Europe have to fight in solidarity with the refugees not only forequal rights but first of all for open borders, abolition of all the EU anti-immigrant policies, abolition of the “hot spots” and concentration camps, for groups of self-defense against the fascist storm troopers attacking the refugees and the migrants.
The refugees’ fate shows the fate of all the exploited and oppressed, who are threatened with being buried under the ruins of the failure of the EU project of the European bourgeoisie. The road to a really human future and civilization should be opened by a common international struggle for a socialist unification of Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok!
10. The upheavals in the last decades in Europe the Occupy movement in the US, the Arab Revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa were only the prelude. After a period of retreats, a new upsurge of the masses is coming as the rebellions in 2018 in Tunisia, Iran, Jordan and Iraq show and the world capitalist crisis is entering a new phase of convulsions
The global systemic crisis is driving both a tendency towards war as well as one towards revolution. The strategic task in front of the international workers movement is to overcome the limitations of the spontaneity of the previous period and arm itself with the necessary perspective, strategy, tactics, and program i.e. a conscious revolutionary leadership.
In today’s conditions of the deepest international interconnectedness and globalized capitalist crisis, where the previous world order as it was established after the end of World War II is falling apart, we need, more than ever before, a revolutionary INTERNATIONAL to organize and lead to victory the world revolutionary struggles of workers and of all the oppressed to universal human emancipation, Communism.
Voted unanimously
Eretria, Greece, 25 July 2018
