The following greeting was delivered by Comrade Joti Brar to the congress of the People’s Democracy Party (PDP) of south Korea on Sunday 14 May 2023.
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Comrades, I bring fraternal greetings from the Communists of Britain. We are most enthused to see the vital role being played by your party all over south Korea, at the heart of your people’s ongoing struggle for national liberation.
Living in an imperialist country means that the conditions in which my own party struggles are significantly different from yours. But we share with you the pressing need to free our people from the rapacious demands of finance capital, which plunders the globe and immiserates the masses everywhere.
In Britain, workers are shocked to find that the privileged position they had enjoyed since 1945, the higher wages, social safety net, secure housing, free healthcare and education, pensions and more is all disappearing.
These gains that the British people thought they had won forever have been under a slow and steady attack for decades, but that attack has now sped up to a full-scale demolition as our rulers try to save their failing economic system at our expense. Today in Britain, workers face rampant inflation and unaffordable prices for basic necessities such as food, fuel and housing.
At the same time, our taxes are being used – and money is being printed – to provide endless subsidies to monopoly corporations, be they energy companies, arms companies, pharmaceutical and healthcare companies, transport companies, banks or some other monopolised section of the economy considered ‘too big to fail’ or next in line for a hand-out.
While our rulers use their control of global mass media and international institutions to preach about ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’, they are suppressing all those (like Julian Assange) who try to tell the truth.
And they are launching wars against every government that wants to run its country according to the will of its own people and not according to the diktat sent out by the lords of finance capital from their offices in Wall Street and the City of London.
These would-be global overlords only respect one right: their own right to exploit and plunder.
In pursuit of that right they violate every right of the world’s masses – the right to eat, to right to secure shelter, the right to raise their children in peace.
At this very moment, 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 has admitted to sending 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.
This plan for proxy war and destruction is also what they are preparing for China and for Korea.
The people of your own country are one of many populations that the imperialists are trying to groom to become another of their proxy armies. They want to use Koreans against Koreans in order to maintain their control over your country – over its resources and especially over its strategically important location.
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.
Because while our determination to resist is growing ever stronger, 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 coming together. The world’s people have had enough.
We communists of Britain have aligned ourselves completely with this rising international anti-imperialist current, knowing well that the struggle in the imperialist countries and the struggle in the oppressed world form two fronts of one unbreakable movement against our common enemy.
We wish you every success with your congress, and in your important work of mobilising workers in south Korea against imperialist domination and for national liberation.
The future belongs to socialism!
