Speech of A. Papariga at the event of the TKP

Socialism will win

Ankara 29 January 2012

On the 29/1 Aleka Papariga, GS of the CC of the KKE, participated in large rally of the TKP in Ankara with the slogan “Socialism will win”. The event of the TKP was held on the anniversary of the so-called “massacre of the 15”. This refers to the massacre of 15 Turkish communists, amongst them the President of the party Mustafa Suphi. The massacre took place in the Black Sea, 29/1 1921, as the 15 communists were trying to escape the bloody terrorism which had been unleashed by the bourgeois class of Turkey in order to wipe out the TKP.

The warm greetings of communist solidarity of the CC of the KKE, of the whole party, its friends and supporters, who appreciate the joint effort, the joint activity of our parties, which constitutes a significant foundation of friendship between our two peoples, accompany us here amongst you. We warmly salute our joint efforts to reconstruct the international communist movement and raise the global message of action like the one you are promoting today, the slogan Socialism will win.

The crisis of capitalism which is developing even more deeply and intensely, inside and outside of Europe, places before every communist a party a dual and unified task: To take on even more responsibilities and initiatives so that the peoples of every country whether they are in the higher levels of the imperialist pyramid or the middle or lower levels, withstand the multi-facetted ideological pressure which they receive, the employer and state repression, and understand the cause of the crisis, something which means development of the anti-capitalist-anti-monopoly consciousness. And at the same time with the greatest possible unity of the working class, with the greatest possible alliance with the poor popular strata of the self-employed in the city and village, to move matters forwards, to the rupture and the overthrow at the level of power.

We well know that the struggle is not strengthened only by slogans and propaganda, of course these are needed, a lot of practical work is needed, unprecedented in depth and extent so that the struggle from being defensive starts to become offensive, to bring about fissures in the correlation of forces, to tangibly weaken the bourgeois political system not to allow it to use whatever possibility it has in every country to buy time at the expense of the workers. What is required is that the overthrow of the power of the monopolies is placed at the centre of the struggle, together with the acquisition of working class power which can also express the interests of its allies, as they are determined in each country, in line with developments in class structure.

The cause of the crisis in Greece, which is a relatively small and productively weaker country in the framework of the EU and for this reason is subject to the consequences of the greater competition is the same as the cause of the crisis in Italy, Portugal, Ireland, the same as the cause of the crisis which threatens France. It has the same cause at source, with the crisis in Argentina, Russia, Thailand and the tigers of South East Asia.

Of course there are Greek specificities, but they did not cause the crisis.

The source of the crisis is found in production, in the sphere of money circulation contradictions and paradoxes emerge, the malfunctions in capitalist mode of production.

We rejected from the outset the call for national mobilization so that we could all together allegedly save Greece from the crisis.

Important struggles have been developing in Greece over the last three years, the number of general strikes is the greatest today in Europe, while there have been countless sectoral, factory and enterprise level strikes both in the public and private sector.

Other forms of struggle have multiplied: occupations of public institutions and services through which new taxes and enormous taxes with the electricity bills are being paid- even by the unemployed- occupations of ministries, demonstrations with new radical demands. Every step which the labour movement makes in Greece is in conflict with the toughest employers and the mechanisms of the state. It is exceptionally important that in many of the country’s cities and in neighbourhoods of the big cities and Athens and Thessalonica, people’s committees of the social alliance are being formed by trade unions which participate in PAME, by forces of the lower middle strata, by farmers’ associations, by women’s organizations and students’ organizations which organize militant mobilizations, support the strikers through solidarity, the unemployed, impede the cutting off of the electricity to households who cannot pay them or to families who have not paid the additional heavy taxes which come with the electricity bills.

There is no struggle, small or large, where the communists are not in the front line, in most of them it is they who have taken the initiative, while we are of course interested in new forces entering these struggles which have up to now been trapped in the dominant political line, in the bourgeois parties.

This movement forced the bourgeois class of the country and the organs of the EU to encourage the formation of a new government . Now they have revealed their true colours in Greece, we have a three-party government of the two bourgeois parties of power and a small nationalist, racist and anti-communist party which is a tool of the system, with a banker as Prime Minister, who until very recently was vice-president of the ECB.

And nevertheless the struggles did not stop, they are multiplying. This government is a rehearsal for a post-election coalition government of the centre-right, as they say, or/and for the need of a centre-left government with the support of opportunism which constitutes a holding position in the case where a stable and clear bourgeois solution is not formed immediately or in the next few years.

It is an opportunity for the historical limits of the capitalist system and the anarchy of production to be understood. It is an opportunity for the prospect of working class popular power to begin to be more widely reflected on and to become more attractive. Working class popular power which is the alliance proposal of the KKE, addressed above all to the social forces and to those who want real and not fake change, regardless of whether they agree with us on everything regarding socialism.

The fact that the socialist social revolution is not on the agenda today does not mean that objectively the necessity of socialism is not posed as the answer to the obsolete capitalist path of development.

The crisis will deepen, the centrifugal tendencies within the EU will intensify. However many sacrifices the peoples make, however much consent and submission they show, all these will not determine the question of the bankruptcy, nor will it ensure heightened rates of development, nor will their gains be returned which have been snatched from them.

In the conditions of crisis it is a fact that even if radicalism strengthens to a greater or lesser extent a retreat can be noted in the face of the immediate and pressing economic problems, unemployment, the search for work. We are trying to explain in the fullest way to the people the dangers which threaten them, so they can acquire readiness and the ability to forecast in good time. One danger concerns the problem of the developmental capabilities of the country.

Whether there is a crisis or not, in the conditions of the power of the monopolies and assimilation in the EU, development capabilities of the country were lost and are being lost, both the productive capabilities and the potential for popular consumption. Capabilities were lost for the development of the living standards and educational and cultural level, based on today’s contemporary needs. The potential was lost for the workers to work for fewer hours and to enjoy more goods: material, intellectual, cultural. That is to say it is not only the loss of income and whatever gains existed but that they are attempting to close the road to new gains in the future.

The bourgeois management is not only accompanied by political instability at a national level, it brings along with it local military conflicts and interventions behind which the conflict between the powers of the international imperialist system is expressed. The sources and the transport routes of oil and natural gas are covered in blood.

The imperialists and their propaganda talk about the “Arab Spring”, we assessed within the movements the people’s desire for a better life, the reaction in the face of the sharpening problems, but we saw at the same time the attempt to obstruct the peoples from leaving their mark on developments, to forestall genuine popular uprisings and especially the awakening of the working class, to change governments and to impose governments more friendly to the one or the other imperialist.

The struggle against the foreign occupation must not lose its class characteristics, as the bourgeois class whether it loses or wins never loses its main goal to break and defeat the labour movement and the people’s movement more generally.

The political line of rupture and disengagement from the EU is a precondition for an outcome of the struggle in favour of the working class, for the prospect of socialism, for a united socialist Europe. This prospect cannot arrive automatically and in a synchronised way all over Europe. It will arrive as a result of successive and, in every phase, coordinated blows at a national level.

We think in this way, we struggle in this way, studying of course your experience, as well as that of the parties and movements in Europe and everywhere.

Long live the friendship of our two peoples, the joint activity of our two parties. Socialism will win, and it will be better and more beautiful than the socialism we knew, because today there is the rich experience of socialist construction, its achievements and also its mistakes and deviations.

Socialism will win.