Tenth International Meeting of Communist and Workers’ Parties
São Paulo, 23 November 2008
Address by Lynda Walker
National Chairperson, Communist Party of Ireland
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We note with enthusiasm the poster that we are rallied under, where a woman carries the Red Flag. This is symbolic of the need to embrace women’s emancipation. As President Chávez argued recently, “the problem of women’s liberation is the problem of people’s liberation, the problem of women’s equality is the problem of society’s equality.” We need to rescue and reonnect the fight for gender equality with the fight for social justice. We have to struggle against the unequal economic and social burdens that women continue to carry, and we know that they suffer from the worst forms of personal violence in war and in peace; they continue to experience severe difficulties in securing control over areas such as reproductive rights. In Ireland the CPI is actively campaigning on these issues.
Comrades and friends: We are proud to be on the American continent at a time of such historic change. We applaud those changes and recognise that they are giving revolutionary inspiration to progressive people the world over. We celebrate the ten years of the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela, and next year we look forward to celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Cuban Revolution. We will be in Havana with Irish trade unionists for May Day, 2009, and we will invite our Cuban comrades to Ireland for International Women’s Day and other events. The Cuban people have faced great problems; they have not only helped themselves but have also provided aid, especially medical aid, to people around the world.
The victory of Evo Morales in Bolivia is bringing five hundred years of racial oppression to an end, an event equivalent to the ending of apartheid in South Africa. This year the attempt by the USA to foment a civil war and divide the country, as they did with Yugoslavia, was frustrated, and the new constitution will confirm the equality of its entire people.
We also recognise that this is a very dangerous time for people in this part of the world, because the imperialist powers, especially the USA, are looking for and creating opportunities to intervene through legal and illegal means by use of violence and whatever it takes to overthrow the democracies in Latin America. (This is expanded upon in the resolution of solidarity with Latin America and the Caribbean peoples.)
Since the last meeting of the international communist and workers’ movement in Belarus there have been major developments in the world with the predicted financial crisis. We as Marxists recognise that the crisis (euphemistically named the “credit crunch”) is endemic to capitalism, it is structural, and not merely of finance capitalism. The crisis has also exposed to an even greater extent the interconnections between the state in bourgeois society and monopoly capitalism. Working people, who are the main victims of the crisis, are looking for answers, and whilst we cannot proclaim to have all the answers we do know that imperialism holds no positive future for humankind. Our general concerns are about life’s essentials—food, fuel, housing; and for large swathes of the globe—in sub-Saharan Africa, for example—those existing on less than one dollar a day do not need the latest western symptoms to manifest themselves, to teach them of the disease of capitalist barbarity.
Lenin wrote: “Capitalism, formerly a liberator of nations, has now, in its imperialist stage, become the greatest oppressor of nations. Formerly progressive, it has become a reactionary force. It has developed the productive forces to such an extent that humanity must either pass over to socialism or for years, nay, decades, witness armed conflicts of the ‘great’ nations for an artificial maintenance of imperialism by means of colonies, monopolies, privileges, and all sorts of national oppression.” In spite of the immense changes since Lenin’s words were written, the fundamental nature of imperialism has not changed, though now it has the power to destroy the environment and render the Earth uninhabitable.
Amidst the propaganda of the “end of history” in the early 90s, following the dismantling of the Soviet Union, the Communist Party of Ireland has retained allegiance to the principles of Marxism-Leninism.
The integration of financial and industrial capital and the growth of the transnational corporations that dominate the global economy, along with the power of the military-industrial complex, are beyond anything that Lenin could have imagined. The scientific and technological revolution has allowed monopoly capitalism to expand the productive forces, which in turn has exposed the inherent instability and structural fissures of the system.
Educational institutions are more than ever instruments of propaganda, and the mainstream media are as thoroughly integrated in implementing imperialist policy as the “embedded” journalists are with the US army in Iraq. Despite the media being in fewer and fewer hands, and reporters cosily embedded as never before, the mass of the population were not duped; and it could be argued that the challenge to the illegal wars did not stop them but did damage the ‘crusade’ leaders to the point of their fall: Blair, Aznar, and Bush.
In Ireland we have the dubious privilege of being governed by two governments who give undisguised support to the foreign and economic policies of the United States government. The UK Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, stated that he would support whatever measures the US government made to get us out of this financial crisis. The “privilege” is a consequence of and compounded by the colonial (Northern Ireland) and neo-colonial status of the two political entities on the island of Ireland. The people in the North of Ireland experience all the attacks that are made on the British working class through anti-trade union legislation and social cuts.
Over the past year in Ireland there has been a sharp decline in manufacturing and the economy in general. What was once considered to be the prime example of the capitalist world, the “Celtic Tiger” is now in sharp decline. Many factories are being relocated outside of Ireland, and workers are being thrown onto to the scrap-heap of unemployment. Migrant workers in particular are experiencing problems as jobs become more and more scarce; some people look for scapegoats to blame; racism is a growing issue that we as communists are trying to confront through the trade union movement.
In 2006 we had nearly 250,000 migrant workers working in the Republic of Ireland. For the first time in modern Irish history we witnessed an influx of migrant workers, working in various sectors of the economy, from high-tech industries to call centres, market gardening, industrial farming, the food and services sectors and in the building industry. Many were brought in to fill specific gaps in the labour market; many are now facing redundancies as manufacturing moves to other countries as cheap labour for exploitation.
The Irish Government left no doubt that, while it is prepared to borrow billions of euros to save the bankers from themselves, it would cut health, education and social services as well as family planning services. There have already been massive protests on specific issues, such as the defence of free medical care for the elderly and free third-level education.
The economic forces driving EU integration, the people who really make these decisions, do not use such categories as “good” or “bad”: their values are based upon the maximisation of profits, market share, market penetration, labour availability, and global strategies of domination. Their economic and political class interests guide them. The external politics of the EU parallel those of the USA in enforcing neo-liberal economics on the poor countries, including here in Latin America. The EU is no less imperialist than the USA.
It is becoming increasingly clear to growing numbers of working people across the member-states of the EU that the EU itself and its institutions are responsible for the growing attacks on their living standards and their rights. The decisions in the Viking, Laval, Rüffert and Luxembourg cases in the European Court of Justice represent a direct attack on trade-union and workers’ rights, combined they allow employers to apply slave wages and conditions, with no recourse to trade-union rights.
These struggles provide us the opportunity to build alliances of communist and workers’ organisations across the EU to combat these serious attacks upon workers. These anti-trade-union decisions are independent from the Lisbon Treaty, but if the treaty is successfully imposed upon the peoples of the EU it will be almost impossible to reverse these decisions.
The campaign in the Republic to reject the Lisbon Treaty culminated in what can only be described as a stunning victory that has had repercussions throughout the other member-states of the European Union. This setback to the Business Club of Europe was due to the mass mobilisation of the people of Ireland. We on the left know that the treaty is about cementing the principles of the so-called market into law and restricting the rights of trade unions even more so. The lack of accountability and transparency in how decisions are made make people deeply suspicious of a more powerful, centralised Europe.
All the establishment parties, including the social-democratic Irish Labour Party, supported the treaty, as did a majority of the leadership of the trade union movement. In spite of this the vast majority of Labour voters and trade union members voted “no.”
It is likely that the treaty would have been defeated in many countries had it been put to a referendum. Ireland’s constitution demands that a referendum had to take place. Other governments were not about to chance the vote. The Lisbon Treaty was rejected for the following reasons:
• strong rejection of the growing EU militarism;
• defence, in principle, of national democracy;
• a deep unease about the unaccountability of EU decision-making bodies;
• workers in particular viewed with growing alarm the decisions of the European Court of Justice.
We Irish communists worked and continue to work through the People’s Movement in order to build maximum unity of progressive forces to oppose any further measures that develop the EU into a federal state and to defend and enhance popular sovereignty, democracy and social justice in Ireland. The People’s Movement mounted a successful campaign, explaining to farmers, fishermen and industrial workers why it was in their specific interest to vote no.
In the North of Ireland there is the danger of political stagnation, with unionists refusing to share power with nationalists and the reversion to the comfort zone of sectarian tit-for-tat, which is implicitly reactionary and pro-imperialist. The danger that lies in this continuing stagnation is the temptation by extremist elements to attempt to destabilise the situation by resorting to armed conflict. The CPI continues to appeal to those armed groups, both loyalist and republican, who engage in failed military responses to what are political problems to end their campaigns of violent sectarian intimidation. We do, however, welcome a situation where there is less violence, allowing open and non-conspiratorial politics. It gives us the opportunity to work for the unity of the people and of the country across a range of organisations, from trade union, women’s and community organisations.
The ongoing peace process holds opportunities and problems, but as communists we believe that we have better conditions to work for a united socialist Ireland through calling for full fiscal powers to be given to the Executive, the building of social struggles that can bring community reconciliation and united community action. Amidst the wider political disaffection only progressives offer any possibility of outlining an alternative economic and social strategy.
The oppression of the Palestinian people by the Israeli state is of utmost concern to those who desire justice and lasting peace. Backed by the US, the Israeli state continues its policy of apartheid, building settlements and building the Wall. Last year the Irish Congress of Trade Unions adopted a policy of boycotting Israeli products; they sent a high-profile delegation to Israel and Palestine and are actively working in solidarity with the progressive people of Palestine and Israel.
The Irish Government continues to allow the US to use Shannon Airport as a refuelling point, and there is evidence that the jets that stop there are used as a staging area for rendition operations. The decision of Shannon Town Council to call for inspections of all US planes is a significant indication that opposition to Ireland’s role in the “war on terror” is beginning to find its voice again. The “Celtic Tiger” has become vulnerable in the world economy; this code word for neo-liberalism has left the Irish economy compromised and its independence threatened by the client relationship with the US dollar. Little wonder, then, that Ireland has become a filling station for the US air force.
Both the British and Irish governments continue to support the illegal war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Communist Party reiterates the policy made at our last congress for the immediate withdrawal of occupation forces and for international solidarity with the people of Afghanistan and Iraq.
For all the great power of the imperialists they cannot find a solution to their problems and contradictions. It is time for more enhanced co-operation between communists, as the task facing us is indeed great—not alone in the crisis of imperialism deepening, it could also bring about the environmental destruction of our planet, threatening our very existence.
I read the chilling words of the Cuban writer Roberto Regalado, who said that it is impossible to tell when capitalism will die, “but it is clearly in the stage of advanced senility, and if its death does not occur as a result of a revolutionary social transformation its life cycle will conclude with the extinction of the human race.” It is up to us build the movements that will kill off capitalism.
Once again, comrades, it is time for greater unity of communist and other progressive forces. We owe this to ourselves, to working people and most importantly to future generations. We know what we need to do, we know the weaknesses of our enemy, we know the forces that we need to mobilise.