Comrade Jotis’ speech.
Article text.
The following greeting was delivered on behalf of our party by Comrade Joti Brar to the recent Summit Against Hypocrisy, organised in Washington DC by the Centre for Political Innovation.
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Comrades, I bring greetings from the Communists of Britain, and thanks for inviting us to attend your summit. We are very heartened to see a much-needed revival of Marxist politics in the USA, the world’s most powerful and rapacious imperialist power.
Living in the belly of the beast puts a particular responsibility on workers here, and gives a particular significance to your struggle against imperialism and for socialism.
This is a responsibility that is shared by workers in my country too, which may not any longer be the world’s most powerful imperialist, but which remains one of the largest stores of finance capital on the globe and home to the world’s oldest imperialist ruling class.
We share with you the difficulties that come with struggling to unite workers who have been bribed for generations into accepting their place as wage slaves within the capitalist system. Workers whose movements for socialism – and even for workers’ rights within the present system – have been bought off, repressed, fragmented and diverted by the concerted efforts of the state.
In both our countries, we have seen how workers’ demands have been coopted by our rulers, so that it is now the ruling class that has the effrontery to lecture the poor about ‘respect’ and ‘equality’ – even as it enforces its regime of extreme and growing inequality onto the backs of the poor.
Indeed, our rulers have the effrontery to preach to the world about democracy and human rights even as they are subverting democracy in every corner of the globe and violating the most basis rights of the people – the rights to eat, to right to secure shelter, the right to raise their children in peace.
Right now, our rulers are engaged in a criminal proxy war of aggression that is aimed at destroying the independence and sovereignty of Russia. Such a war is internationally recognised as the highest crime against humanity. Yet under the banner of ‘defending democracy’ the imperialists are funding fascists, silencing all opposition, and using the Ukrainian people as cannon fodder in their attempt to impose their will and open up the Russian territory to their corporate looting.
My own government is at this moment preparing to send depleted uranium rounds to Ukraine – weapons that will not only destroy tanks and soldiers but will poison the land, air and water and blight the lives of generations to come.
Let us never forget, however, that the very need that our rulers feel to talk about ‘human rights’, ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’; the very fact that they have to admit that there is no justification for sexism, no justification for racism, is itself a retreat that was forced on them by the October Revolution – that earth-shattering and epoch-defining event, which opened up the era in which we now live – the era of socialist revolution.
Since 1917, our rulers have been living on borrowed time, and their system has been on an increasingly shaky footing.
October proved to the world that women can play an equal part in social and political life when the material conditions are created for their liberation.
October proved to the world that peoples can live in harmony when the material conditions for a decent life are created by and provided to all.
The October Revolution forced our rulers onto the back foot, and they have never really been off it, despite their temporary crowing over the counter-revolution that brought down the USSR.
Today, workers everywhere are once more having to learn the hard lesson that the continued existence of the global capitalist-imperialist system can bring them nothing but poverty and war.
As the world’s banks teeter once more on the verge of a systemic collapse; as the world’s people suffer the results of inflation that has been created by the attempts to solve previous crises through money-printing; as more and more peoples in the world are threatened by the outbreak of the war that the imperialists hope will save their system and their dominance, it is only the communists who can truly explain what is happening and help workers find their way out of the mists of darkness.
Comrades, the present may seem dark, the forces ranged against us may seem overwhelming, but there is a bright future awaiting us on the other side of the coming battles.
And our enemies have a weakness that is eating them from the inside – the inherent contradictions of capitalism, contradictions that are driving the development of the forces that will destroy their system and bring down their rule.
We, the conscious element of those forces, must do everything in our power to make sure that the end of this parasitic system comes sooner rather than later. Humanity demands this of us.
Internationally, the forces of a new world order are rapidly coming together. The world’s people have had enough. Working-class movements in the USA and Britain must align themselves completely with this rising international anti-imperialist current, forming two fronts of one unstoppable movement to defeat our common enemy for good.
We wish you every success with this weekend’s summit, and in your important work of mobilising workers in the USA against imperialism.
The future belongs to socialism!
