Does the anti-imperialist struggle make sense nowadays? If so, on what theoretical and practical basis? What unbridgeable contradictions have led to the escalation of war once again on the fronts of Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America? Is the ongoing World War III in any way relevant to the anti-imperialist and socialist-communist movement?
The history of Venezuela condenses the history of the capitalist and imperialist colonization and overexploitation of the peoples of Latin America in a very clear and representative way. A tragic history of the conquest of indigenous peoples by European invaders, of enslavement, genocide, and various forms of overexploitation of both people and nature. In this predatory relationship, colonialist overexploitation led to the extermination of indigenous peoples, combined with the importation of slaves, in other words, a brutal system of colonial overexploitation that was carried out in terms of the combined genocide of peoples on two continents: Latin America and Africa. More than a century of uprisings, national liberation and social struggles and wars were needed before the Venezuelan people achieved their formal independence and the abolition of slavery. The Spanish colonialist was replaced by the Yankee neo-colonialist, who never stopped seeing the whole of Latin America as the “backyard” of the United States. The vast reserves of natural wealth, especially hydrocarbons, contributed to the treatment of the country and its people as imperialist prey. It has been proven historically that there is no means (legitimate or illegitimate, “peaceful” or warlike, “democratic” or dictatorial, intervention or imposition, repression, or genocide) that US imperialism would hesitate to use in order to achieve the subjugation and overexploitation of the peoples of Latin America.
Latin America is a land drenched in the blood of heroes, in successive waves of revolts, national liberation wars and anti-colonial – anti-imperialist struggles. Significant milestones in these struggles are the Mexican anti-imperialist revolution (1910-1917), the Cuban anti-imperialist revolution that evolved into a socialist revolution (1953-1959), the Sandinista anti-imperialist revolution in Nicaragua (1979) and the Bolivarian anti-imperialist revolution in Venezuela beginning in 1998 under the leadership of Hugo Chavez, whose anti-imperialist and people-first orientation – despite the fierce attacks of imperialism – continues under the leadership of Nicolas Maduro. All the victories and achievements as well as the defeats of the anti-imperialist movement in Latin America and all over the world are linked -organically but non-linearly- to the victories and achievements, defeats and failures of early socialism (USSR, PR of China, PR of Korea, PR of Vietnam, Cuba, etc.).
Thus, in Latin America, particularly in Venezuela, there are processes underway which either lead to early socialist revolutions or can be characterized as the starting stages of socialist reforms, and/or a series of new early socialist revolutions. The center of the global revolutionary process has shifted to countries and regions with weak or medium level of capitalist development, where the unresolved internal and international, global contradictions are concentrated in an explosive node which gestates revolutionary situations. But why?
The stage of monopoly capitalism, imperialism, is characterized by the rapid sharpening of the contradictions of capitalism: between capital and labor, between monopolies of similar or different scale and power, between monopolistic and non-monopolistic capital, between imperialist and weakly developed dependent countries.
After the victory of the early socialist revolutions in several countries, the contradiction between capital and labor also takes the form of the contradiction between two socio-economic systems: between the world capitalist system and the world early socialist system.
The contradiction between imperialist and medium or less developed countries, as V.I. Lenin first proved, constitutes the typical world-scale class contradiction of the stage of monopoly capitalism, which arises from the qualitatively different type of world-scale exploitation compared to the stage of “free competition”: the extraction of surplus-value in the form of monopoly super-profits. This contradiction combines and condenses all other contradictions. Essential expression of this contradiction is the intensification of uneven development, which determines the law governed shift in space and time of the probabilities of the outbreak of revolutionary situations in the “weak link”, shifting the center of the world revolutionary process to the periphery of the world capitalist system. The weakest, the most vulnerable link of the global capitalist system are the countries of weak or medium level of development, dependent or semi-independent (formally independent).
The ongoing World War III is drastically sharpening, bringing to the surface, and highlighting in relief all the contradictions I have mentioned above, the geotectonic shifts of power on a global scale, the retreat of the US-led frontline countries of imperialism and the upgrading of the pole that de facto constitutes the early socialist countries together with states and coalitions of states that emerged from anti-imperialist and national liberation movements.
This war is also a conflict between the parasitic imperialist rentier countries (dominated by the virtual capital of the financial oligarchy) and the countries that produce goods necessary for humanity.
This war -especially on the fronts of Ukraine and the post-Soviet space as a whole- also takes on the characteristics of a civil (political-class) war, since imperialism aims at further division based on the imperialist practice of “divide and rule”, or -from the other camp- the escalation of tendencies towards coalescence, reunification and reintegration, with Russia as a relatively powerful last state formation holding huge deposits of natural resources and preserving elements of the most substantial legacies of the USSR: army and weapon systems, industrial infrastructure, research and advanced technology and -above all- a people with education and culture that is steeped in anti-fascist and socialist traditions.
This war also takes on anti-fascist characteristics, insofar as the attacking Euro-Atlantic axis, establishes fascist/racist type or overtly fascist-Nazi regimes, as instruments and strongholds of its aggression. Typical is the case of the Nazi regime currently holding power in Ukraine.
Hence, especially now that the World War III is escalating, it is necessary and imperative to organically link the anti-imperialist struggle with the struggle for socialist revolution and communism. Besides, any anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, national liberation, national independence, anti-fascist, etc. objectives can be effectively and consistently accomplished by revolutionary fronts in which the communists play a leading and decisive role, since these objectives are organically linked to the revolutionary perspective of socialism, through transitional reforms of a socialist character.
For the above reasons, the World Anti-Imperialist Platform (WAP) was formed and is being developed. For the same reasons, the WAP has chosen to organize this extremely important international conference in Caracas, where beats strongly the heart of the Latin American and world anti-imperialist movement.
Only a society, in which the working class will hold the reins of revolutionary power and the social ownership of the strategically important means and sectors of production, which achieves a high level of independent development in terms of scientific planning, people’s control, relations of equality, mutual benefit and internationalist solidarity, can effectively, firmly, and victoriously confront the imperialist undermining and attacks. Thus, it is necessary to methodize consciously the optimal way of organizing and escalating the anti-imperialist struggle in organic relation to the struggle for the socialist revolution.
Anti-imperialism and socialism-communism, based on their social, class and ideological-political content, are two distinct but organically interlinked components of a single revolutionary process.
Therefore, the progress of the modern revolutionary process is achieved, insofar as it is carried out within the world capitalist system, above all through the anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist and national liberation struggle, through the struggle of the peoples for their independence, for the transition to a non-capitalist type of development of those countries which are being overexploited by the developed capitalist countries, by the imperialist states. The victorious struggle of the peoples of countries with medium and lower level of development for their independence in a socialist direction, the elimination of the exploitation which they are subjected to by the developed capitalist states and their associations, these are those terms which will create favorable possibilities for the outbreak of revolutionary situations in the most developed capitalist countries.
This is to be achieved through reducing the ability of the imperialist countries to parasitize through the extraction of monopolistic super-profits, and therefore, through reducing the resources which provide the financial oligarchy with the ability to manipulate various strata of the working class (on the basis of venality, of demagogic deception, disorientation, the “divide and rule” principle and brute force-repression). This is the way in which capital ensures the undermining influence of opportunism, a mechanism which ensures the effective promotion of the interests of capital and imperialism by the actions of its’ agents within the workers’ and the communist movement. Therefore, the main form of undermining and defeat of the world capitalist system, can be the secession of countries of medium or near/medium level of development from the relations of imperialist overexploitation/dependence.
A basic precondition for the strengthening of the anti-imperialist struggle today is the refoundation and strengthening of the communist movement on a national, regional, and global scale, based on the creative development and application of contemporary revolutionary theory and methodology. The position and role of the working-class (traditional and new) vanguard party, its consistent commitment to the principles of Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism are the only indispensable conditions in terms of its moral, political, and ideological hegemony for the completion of its historic revolutionary mission.
Peoples’ victory on all anti-imperialist fronts will unavoidably lead to a new wave of victorious socialist revolutions!
Victory to the struggle of the peoples’ anti-imperialist and socialist forces!
Defeat to the US-led Euro-Atlantic axis!