Comrades and friends,Our party has the greatest interest in the world class struggle. For many years after our party was founded in 1959, we had very little support from the vanguard international revolutionary movements.
Before we undertook to build the party, we knew we would be isolated. Yet we nevertheless were ready to reach out to the millions, to the workers of the world represented by the most advanced communist elements.
Today we have more than 20 messages from the international community of communists. It is a great source of confidence that the party has gotten recognition, and is today in struggle for a vanguard position in the world communist movement.
For instance, we have representation here today from the Congo--Zaire. Small as the party was during the struggle of Patrice Lumumba, we were the only party to have a demonstration. When their delegation was detained at Ellis Island, it was your chairperson who went to get their release, even if he had to use his "professionalism" as an attorney. That's how our relations with the workers and peasants of the Congo began.
India now has close to a billion people. The Communist Party of India-Marxist, which sent us a message, represents millions. It is a sign of the validity of our party as a living, struggling organization that they sent us a message.
When the Bhopal disaster took place in India, we were the only organization in this country that had a demonstration against the Union Carbide company and against U.S. imperialist investments.
We consider one of our most important characteristics as a revolutionary party that, in the heartland of U.S. imperialism, we share none of the arrogance that characterizes U.S. organizations. We learn from others and are assimilating the experiences of the international movement, paying closest attention to relations with our colleagues, with our comrades and allies.
The counterrevolution in Russia chose this particular day, May Day, to attack a revolutionary demonstration led by the Russian Communist Workers Party--a party that sees eye to eye with us on the grave issues concerning the Soviet Union and the world.
For the revolution or against it?
They beat the workers with truncheons to show their relationship to the old czarist regime. I hadn't intended to open up my discussion on the Russian question, but the attitude towards the Soviet Union has been key since day one of the revolution. Are you for the revolution or against it?
While recognizing the deficiencies in the Soviet Union, and when necessary distancing ourselves from the leadership, we always supported the Soviet Union as a social structure, as a workers' state. No organization in the United States even came close to us in that kind of support.
Many supported the Soviet Union uncritically when it was strong. But our policy of having a revolutionary, critical attitude toward all social phenomena is what the working class in the United States needs most.
It would be an error on our part to neglect the domestic situation in the United States, and confine ourselves to the international questions. We must rise to the occasion and raise the international questions as part of the domestic class struggle in the U.S.
We all are aware, for instance, that the Pentagon has spent $4 trillion since 1980. A billion dollars is a lot of money. Ten billion dollars is a lot of money. A hundred billion dollars is a lot of money. A thousand billion dollars is a lot of money. But four trillion! It is an almost impossible number. Four trillion is four times a thousand billion.
Why do I raise it? Because some time ago, Clinton asked the Congress, where he has a majority in both houses, to appropriate money for jobs. He asked for $26 billion. That's like asking for pennies by comparison.
And what does the Congress do? It refuses and cuts it down to $4 billion. How can they spend $4 trillion on "defense" and $26 billion on jobs!
Is it greed? The most exorbitant and outlandish form of greed?
Greed yes, but more
Yes, it is greed. But it is more than that. Greed is a characteristic of all ruling classes. Under slavery and feudalism, wherever there are rich and poor, there is greed. But something else is involved here.
It is the nature of the capitalist crisis. It is the fact that there is a highly excessive amount of unemployment, caused by capitalist overproduction.
Clinton didn't even ask them to take money straight out of the Treasury and give it to workers who are unemployed. He said, I will fight for a tax break for the corporations so they can invest in industry and employ workers.
How much kinder can you be to the ruling class?
It is all because of the capitalist crisis. It is not only in the United States. It is in Japan, Britain, France, spreading throughout all of Europe, in Latin America, everywhere.
Why did the ruling class turn down Clinton's proposal to give them money to invest and build? Because the country is overbuilt from their point of view. There is excessive investment and excessive production--over and beyond what the working class can consume with the limited amount of money they have available.
The whole world economy is slowing down at the same time. And now there is the same unemployment in Hungary, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria--wherever they have adopted the capitalist reforms.
This is an era that begs for working-class leadership to organize and prepare for the coming struggle. This situation cannot continue for a long time.
Without tiring the audience with statistics, I want to bring this out. Last year the workers in this country produced $6 trillion worth of goods and services, the so-called gross domestic product. It's a world record. They tell you that U.S. workers can't produce. They compare them sometimes to the Japanese workers, U.S. workers are lazy and all that. Yet because the system is run for profit instead of for use, it is unable to provide the working class a living. The decline in the standard of living continues unabated.
The capitalist system is not characterized by scarcity. It is characterized by superabundance of products and productivity. That is its problem. The lust for profit is stronger than any other motive. It is the only system which produces in abundance to such an extent that it leads to a crisis of poverty amid surplus.
Imperialist economy needs stimulant
The Gulf war, Somalia, Panama, the most recent and outrageous intervention in the Balkans--what does this show? That they are unable to put their system in order without an artificial stimulant like militarism.
Why does the U.S. need to go into the Balkans? They have everything they could want from the Balkans. Yugoslavia was open to investment, open to exploitation. It has not been hostile to U.S. imperialism. It has an open-door policy. Why have they rounded up their rival allies and gotten into it?
For one, it is a diversion from the domestic struggle; for another, it is part and parcel of the organic expansionism of capitalist imperialism throughout the whole world, leaving no stone unturned.
What is happening in the small Balkan countries is a re-run of what happened in the First World War. The imperialist robbers were redividing the world--all its resources, its markets, in fact all its assets.
This little group of small, independent countries stood in the way. It was necessary to swallow them up in some way in order to make the greater war.
Many socialists at the time tried to analyze the First World War on the basis of what was going on in the Balkans. What did it mean to have the Serbians on one side, the Bosnians on the other, or the Croats?
It remained for the few who remained true to revolutionary Marxism to come up with the answer. And they said, in so many words: Don't look at this small country for the answers as to why the imperialists are getting there. Look at the imperialists themselves. They have no business there. The struggle is for the survival of one imperialist group of nations as against another.
What is happening among the nationalities should not be the cause of imperialist intervention. They should stay out of it. That was the Leninist position.
Revolutionary defeatism
Do not take sides with any of the imperialist countries. Do not embellish one as against another. They are equally predatory and vicious, and are concerned mostly with their own profits. The tactic of the proletariat, Lenin said, is to carry out revolutionary defeatism.
The goal is to defeat each one of the imperialist countries on the basis of international solidarity, and not get enmeshed in the intricacies of the national question in the Balkans. Give them the opportunity to solve it--as they did when they formed a federation.
Whoever came out on a May Day demonstration during the First World War was immediately recognized as anti-imperialist and pro-socialist. This is what we have to revive.
The tears being shed for Bosnia should not be taken for good coin. They are crocodile tears. The imperialists could just as well start crying for Serbia tomorrow, or for the Croats, depending upon how the imperialists view each other's interest.
Marxism teaches the workers not to go by vague political sympathies or nationalities alone but to look for the class interests. There is no interest for the working class of the U.S., or France or Britain to go into Bosnia or Serbia.
We look forward to the regeneration of the USSR. No social system ever goes down to defeat unless its potentialities have been thoroughly exhausted. And the potential of the former USSR is by no means exhausted. The working class has not been defeated in a decisive battle. As we said in the last issue of our paper, the struggle is still by word of mouth and propaganda. The decisive struggle between the counterrevolution and the proletariat is still to come. And we are solidly on the side of the proletariat and against the counterrevolution and the imperialists who support it all over the world.
Long Live the Socialist Revolution! We rededicate ourselves on this day to a firmer and more consistent struggle against imperialism and capitalism. Long Live Workers World Party!