Monday, February 17, 2014

The new European Communist Initiative

By New Worker correspondent 
Andy Brooks greets comrades
GREEK communists and their supporters met in north London on Sunday to hear a report by a leading member of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) on the new European Communist Initiative and the ongoing struggle against reaction, opportunism and social-democracy at home and abroad.
            The meeting room at the AKEL Cypriot communist centre in north London was packed for the Sunday lunch-time meeting called by the British Branch of the KKE to mobilise their members in Britain to register at the Greek embassy and vote in the forthcoming local and European Union elections in May.
            Comrades were greeted by New Communist Party leader Andy Brooks who summarised the NCP’s role in the Initiative of the Communist and Workers’ Parties of Europe and the NCP’s consistent stand against the European Union. This was followed by a lengthy report from Kostas Papadakis, a member of the Central Committee of the KKE, on the current situation in Greece and the struggle against the bourgeois offensive throughout the EU.
Andy Brooks said that the NCP had opposed the European Union and the Treaty of Rome from the very beginning when the Party was founded in 1977 and that the Initiative was: “An important first step towards building a common front amongst the genuine communist forces of Europe to confront the ruling class offensive that is seeks to impose the entire burden of the slump on the backs of working people.
“The Initiative is also the first step in building a popular campaign to challenge the myth of the ‘super-state’ that Franco-German imperialism and its supporters within the British ruling class spread to popularise the anti-people and dictatorial policies of the European Union and build the progressive platform needed to launch the fight in all members states for the break-up of the EU.”
This was followed by a far-ranging KKE briefing that began with an analysis of the Greek political scene and the bogus choices offered by the mainstream conservative New Democracy party, the old and new social-democracy of PASOK and Syriza, and the fascist Golden Dawn. They all “trade in fear and dead-end hopes” while  “the consequences of the capitalist economic crisis and the anti-people measures of the government-EU-IMF are becoming more and more tangible, unbearable, even more suffocating for the workers, unemployed, the poor farmers, the youth and the women from the popular strata,”  Kostas Papadakis said.
But there was a way out of the crisis and that way was by mobilising and decisively strengthening the KKE, Kostas declared.
“The workers, the youth, the toiling self-employed, the poor farmers, must help so that a dynamic labour-people’s opposition can be immediately revived in order to contribute to the struggle, in order to halt the anti-people offensive, the successive anti-people measures, in order to pave the way for the only path that can ensure the satisfaction of the people’s needs.
“And this can begin to happen with the participation in the battle of the EU parliamentary elections and the municipal elections, decisively voting for the KKE and the lists of the ‘People’s Rally’, which are supported nationwide by the party.
“The strengthening of the KKE is a guarantee for the working class and people’s interests. The KKE struggles, focused on the major and sharpening problems, for the regroupment of the labour-people’s movement, the People’s Alliance, in order to pave the way for an economy for the benefit of the people, with their own power.”
            The Greek communist condemned those pseudo-communists who revolve around the European Left Party and those like them who talk about winning office and reforming the EU.
“The way out is not to be found in ‘“Left governments’ on the terrain of capitalism” Kostas said.  “As the experience from the participation of communist parties in governments of EU member states shows, like the example of Cyprus, with the participation of AKEL in the government. This experience is in our assessment characteristic of the utopian view that the crisis can be halted or that there can be a pro-people management in the framework of capitalism. The same is true of Brazil where the Communist Party of Brazil participates in the government and manages capitalism with the people protesting in the streets.
“There is no room for the rationale of the ‘lesser evil’ which some people consider a possible Syriza government to be. Whatever evil, more or lesser, is now unbearable for the impoverished and lives of the workers deprived of rights.”
Meanwhile the Communist Initiative provides the basis to build a people’s movement in Europe against war, imperialism and capitalism.
Outlining the socialist alternative Kostas said the KKE programme was realistic and above all in the interests of the people and the service of the workers. “We have the power to overturn the situation today,” he declared. “With a strong KKE there is hope – there is a prospect.”

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