Untitled Document

To participants in Thessaloniki assembly on Balkans

by Party of the Committees to Support Resistance – for Communism (CARC) - Italy

Dear comrades,

we thank you for your invitation to this Conference. We take part in it with a lot of interest and will to learn. Indeed, we have so much to learn about the situation in the Balkans, and about the tasks of the communists in this geographical area.
We ignore many things, because our is a young party and its activity in the international field must yet be developed in detail concerning important political and geographical areas. On the other hand, we want and must develop knowledge and action, first of all when Balkans are concerned.
Our is not a Balkan country, but it borders with the Balkans and the history of the peoples who lived in our peninsula is interweaved with the Balkan peoples’ for thousands years.
In the past century there have been important collaboration and brotherhood activities in the struggle against Nazism and Fascism during the Second World War.
At the same time, from our country several imperialist assaults were headed against Albany, Greece and countries of the former Yugoslavia. In these less or more evident assaults, stood out those forces which are the first enemies of the popular masses in Italy too.
The most clear assault is that of fascist military forces, which invaded Albany, Greece and the countries that were to become united in Yugoslavia after the Second World War. Today neo-fascist and racist attacks often and increasingly hit immigrants from east countries, and racist hatred is stirred up by the Berlusconi gang government.
An open attack also was that of the Italian government, allied to the other NATO forces during the Kosovo war. The specific nature of this attack was that the Italian government was then directed by D’Alema, who had been a leader of the old revisionist PCI party, and had within leaders of parties that still called themselves communists, like Diliberto, of the Italian Communists Party (PdCI). The Kosovo attack is therefore an instructive example that revisionist forces are enemies of the peoples and of the popular masses, and so much to arrive at open war.
Less evident, but powerful and effective, was the attack of the Vatican. The catholic Church was a leading actor in the dismantling of Yugoslavia, fuelling inter-religious hatred, ending up to abandon its own pacifist facade and justify the war. Before and during the Second World War, Christian forces in Croatia and in other countries of the future Yugoslavian Republic, were the same fascist forces, stained with horrible crimes, as happened in Spain, and who directly managed extermination camps.
The Vatican, which is a more powerful force than the Italian State and influences the Italian State more than every other state, and the governments of the imperialist bourgeoisie up to their extreme versions, the fascist one on the right and the revisionist one on the left, have then been revealed as declared enemies of the popular masses in the Balkan region, as well as enemies of the popular masses in our country. These are, in our country, the responsible for the imperialist attack against the Balkan people, both in political and military field. They are therefore responsible for massacres, destructions, expropriations and robberies of human and material resources, for emigration of millions of people from their land to our and other countries, for economical exploitation of the immigrants, for the sexual exploitation of many women.
Against these enemies, dear comrades, we can oppose a winning force. It is the force of the communist movement, which has been powerfully revealed in the whole Balkan area as well as in our country. In the entire first half of the past century it produced glorious resistance movements and conducted wars which often reached victory.
This force, in the second half of the past century, was corrupted by the revisionists, one responsible of the present weakness of the communist movement. The main cause of the decline of the Communist movement is the fact that the communist movement had no strategy for the conquest of power in the imperialist countries, that the left of the Communist movement had not (had not developed) a strategy for building socialism (for leading socialist revolution) in the imperialist countries.

It was kept alive through the decades among the communist anti-revisionist forces which were active, as far as we know, in Italy like in Greece, and today are protagonists and have the responsibility for the rebirth of the communist movement in our countries. These forces are the agents which better can oppose the political and military attack of the imperialists and can gain the most crucial victories. We, representatives of these forces, have hence great opportunities and big responsibilities.
The general context in which we operate is the one of the general crisis of capitalism which by now proceeds without any possibility of restraint by the dominant classes of every country. The bourgeoisie wages a declared war against the popular masses of many countries. Already the streets of some Italian cities are patrolled by the army, and are instituted by the state patrols of citizens, and both the army and the patrols have first of all a repressive function towards the communities of immigrants, particularly related to Romanians and Albanians, who are object of xenophobic propaganda, as were the Jews during Nazism. In the same way, open war acts are the assassination of young Alexis during the December manifestations in Greece, the homicide attack in December against the Bulgarian unionist Konstantina Kuneva in Athens, the bomb against a social centre also in Athens last February. Probably in all Balkan countries forms of violence and aggression are being produced like those we mentioned and even worse, which we don’t know due to scarcity of information.
Against the extermination war, declared and not, open or not, that the imperialist bourgeoisie conducts against the popular masses all over the world as well in the Balkans, the masses react with a mounting resistance and mobilization. This we see in Greece, this we know is happening in other countries.
In Italy the anti-imperialist mobilization of the popular masses spreads and gains conscience. Also in Italy, as well as in other imperialist countries, we had huge manifestations against the imperialist aggression in Iraq, which however did not produce an anti-imperialist movement of large dimensions. As a matter of fact, those manifestations were heavily influenced and even organized by the catholic, bourgeois and revisionist pacifism, enemy of the anti-imperialist movement. All these forces today in Italy are in crisis, and their capacity of influence, that used to move millions of people in manifestations against the war, today is reduced to move few thousands or even hundreds. On the other hand, anti-imperialist forces are able to move hundreds of thousands people, in autonomy and without the large organizational and economical resources disposed until yesterday by the apparatus inheritor of the old revisionist PCI.
This already happened many times in the last years, and twice due to questions directly related to anti-imperialism. The first time in June 2007 in Rome, anti-imperialist forces collected 200000 people who protested against the USA during Bush’s visit. In another square, revisionists could not gather more than 500 people. The second time, in January 2009, anti-imperialist forces gathered in Rome from 150000 to 200000 people protesting against the Zionist aggression in Gaza. The bourgeois, catholic and revisionist pacifists did not gather more than 5000 people in the march for peace at Assisi. In this last occasion, for the first time large popular immigrant masses (Arab and Islamic, in this case) joined the anti-imperialist forces, while until then they had moved under the influence of revisionists and catholic nets of assistance.
Besides this, it has been going for years the mobilization of Vicenza population against the expansion of the NATO base. Also this produced large mass manifestations and inflicted blows to the credibility of centre-left forces and to the stability of their governments.
In this situation, in the international relationships, our Party will proceed according to the front politics line, the only way to reinforce the unity of the international movement. The front politics line is based on three pillars: 1. straightforward and open debate among communist, revolutionary, anti-imperialist and progressive organizations and parties, 2. cooperation among these organizations and parties in practice, and in this case in the anti-imperialist practice, 3. solidarity against repression which hits these organizations and the parties and the popular masses and the peoples who struggle against imperialism.
Thus said, the best form of solidarity which can be given to the peoples attacked by imperialism remains the struggle against imperialism in one’s own country. More and more this struggle against imperialism is set in dialectics with the struggle for socialism, and becomes one with the struggle for socialism. More and more we have to declare not only what we fight against, but what we fight for. More and more we have to suggest which are the concrete steps towards socialism, and put them into practice. Nepali Communist Party (Maoist) has given us big lessons in this sense.
In Italy and in the Balkan countries the conditions to advance towards socialism are more mature than in many other parts of the world. It is clear that the bourgeoisie has not any capacity to govern our countries, other than through more and more reactionary and fascists measures, and through the imposition of misery, repression and war. Our Party, together with the other forces operating according to the Plan indicated by the (new) Italian Communist Party, works actively for a government of the country which will unite the various forces organized for the resistance against the bourgeois attack, a People’s Block government. Our Party propagandize among the masses that to overcome the crisis it is necessary to establish socialism. But the necessary condition for building socialism is that the revival of the communist movement is more advanced than it is today in our country. Today in our country we are far from having created a network of workers and popular organizations oriented by a Communist Party. So now establishing socialism is a word which directs our propaganda, and it does not indicate how to respond immediately to the crisis. Our Party is working to create the conditions necessary for the workers and people’s organization to constitute an emergency government, the only one who can take the necessary measures to address at least the most serious effects of the crisis. The struggles to create the conditions to support and defend the government of emergency and enforce its measures will make advance the revival of the Communist movement and will allow us to deal successfully with the civil war that sooner or later the right wing of the bourgeoisie will rouse against it ". These conditions are the following three: 1) to propagandize widely among the popular masses the need of a People’s Block Government until making it the goal of all those who do not want to pay owners’ crisis, 2) to promote the birth of new people's organizations and strengthen the existing ones, 3) to promote coordination between them.

Despite the differences between our country and the close countries in the Balkan region, we think that also in the Balkans the situation is mature for People’s Block governments. In all Balkan countries the resistance of the popular masses and the communist movement have on their back a big tradition and experience, and ahead great potentiality. People’s Block governments are the best guarantee to face the external and internal imperialist aggression with strength positions, to face with a victorious perspective the war that the imperialist bourgeoisie is preparing, in order to create new socialist countries.

Long live the resistance of the popular masses of all the world against imperialism!
Let’s change the resistance into attack!
Let’s move towards victory!