Unite the workers’ struggle with the liberation of nations

A Workers World Party member since 1962, Catalinotto addressed the final session of the Lenin Centennial of Jan. 21, 2024. The following text is based on his talk.

As a managing editor of Workers World newspaper for the last 41 years, I value the written word. Thus, I’d like to recognize some of the revolutionary writers whose words have empowered the Lenin centennial, both to thank them and to call attention to their writing for the use of all involved in this event. By publishing their texts at workers.org, we can construct the connection between the class struggle worldwide and the liberation of West Asia.

We thank Ángeles Maestro (of the Communist Nucleii of the Spanish state) who interviewed Leila Ghanem (of Lebanon). Maestro introduced Ghanem as a Lebanese communist, close to the Palestinian resistance as well as the Lebanese resistance, and someone who knows things that people in general do not know about the creation of the Axis of Resistance and the struggle of the Palestinian people. Ghanem’s description of October 7 paints a detailed and revolutionary analysis of the unity in action among various tendencies of the anti-imperialist resistance.

We thank Marc Vandepitte, a Belgian Leninist who writes for Investigaction in Belgium and for various French- and Spanish-language sites. Vandepitte analyzes the intricate relationship over the last 140 years between world imperialism, especially British and U.S. imperialism, and the Zionist movement. He exposes the role the Israeli state plays in the service of the world imperialist ruling class.

We thank Olmedo Beluche, a Panamanian Marxist sociologist and a leader of the Citizen’s Pole, whose article decries the horrible irony: that persecuted and victimized people can be trapped into becoming settlers and captive to the program of world imperialism, victimizing other peoples.

We thank Manuel Raposo, a Leninist from Portugal, editor of jornalmudardevida.net, who contributed an analysis of why the imperialist countries give unconditional support to Israel. He writes, “The behavior of the United States, the European Union and Europe in general shows beyond doubt that Israel’s war against the Palestinians is part of a general war by the imperialist West against the peoples of the Middle East.” For Raposo, Israel’s genocidal actions and the U.S. and European Union backing forewarns all workers and oppressed of the brutality the ruling class is capable of when their system and property is at stake.

We thank The International Peace Initiative − Stop World War 3, whose conference in Rome on Oct. 27-28 of 2023 drew 40 organizations from 24 countries. They prepared an event targeting U.S.-NATO aggression in Ukraine directed against Russia, but after October 7, they also focused on building solidarity with the Palestinian people against Israel’s genocidal war. The group’s latest statement declares: “Palestine needs even stronger support from all who fight for democratic rights, for self-determination against imperialism and colonialism and for a new international order.”

We thank the organization Mucadele Birligi (Struggle Union – Türkiye). We thank Alison Bodine of The Fire This Time organization in Vancouver, Canada, the Manuel Rodriguez Patriotic Front in Chile, the Labor Union of Education, Health and Public Services in Venezuela and the Communist Party of Swaziland. All sent us statements of solidarity that we’ll make available on workers.org.

We conclude our thanks to Lenin himself. Not that we channeled him. Still, he left us a message. The words and actions of his Bolshevik Party speak to our conference. In September 1920, one of the early international messages linked the colonized masses to the young Russian Revolution, which stretched out to the struggle of the oppressed peoples of Asia at the Congress of the Peoples of the East, in Baku, Azerbaijan.

The Communist International’s message from Baku called for a “holy war to end the division of countries into advanced and backward, dependent and independent, metropolitan and colonial!” and a “holy war for the liberation of all humanity from the yoke of capitalist and imperialist slavery, for the ending of all forms of oppression of one people by another and of all forms of exploitation.”

At that time the energy of the Bolshevik revolution inspired and aided the anti-imperialist uprisings in the East, from the Global South. Today the energy is from the heroic uprising in West Asia. We in Workers World Party call upon the workers in the West to join that class war against exploitation and for the liberation of humanity.