Dear comrades who have called this internationalist conference and those who are participating in it,
We are living through very difficult times for the international revolutionary movement, but also the crisis of the system is advancing and we must prepare ourselves for days of intense struggle. We have a clear proletarian ideology and the proletarian science of marxism-leninism, which applied to each of our realities will carry us to victory. The victory will be the result of the joint force of all those who are excluded from the system. Our unity is the most powerful weapon for victory. There are no more than a handful of families which divide up and benefit from our exclusion.
Not all those who brought the Bolshevik revolution to victory had a proletarian ideology. It was only the members of the party who had ideology and understood marxism at various levels, through a very strong internal ideological struggle, which made possible an ever greater theoretical and practical development. But this did not prevent the development of a broad policy which attracted all the excluded towards the revolution. It is the dialectic of marxism-leninism which is the guarantee of the discussion which we must have. We add to this the internationalist revolutionary principles of New Men like Che.
Marxism is not a dead letter. It is not a dogma. It is a dialectic in constant movement to transfrom quantity into quality, to make qualitative leaps, not to atomise ourselves and convert ourselves into small sects unable to understand the interests of the broad layers of non-proletarian sectors of the population. In our own internationalist movement today we have to try to draw up a minimum balance sheet of our struggles, of our defeats and victories. Comrades, we are not afraid of making mistakes – the onlz ones who never make mistakes are those who do nothing. Also, we learn from our errors. To make mistakes is human, to rectify them is revolutionary.
For a class line in the internationalist movement! Without struggles there are no victories! With the masses and with weapons! Socialism or death … We will win!
- A Continental, Anti-Imperialist and Non-Aligned International Policy. (Document from the II Central Committee of the MRTA – 1998)
Full political and economic sovereignty. A complete break with all public or secrete economic, political military or cultural pact which ties us to the neo-colonial structure of imperialism. Our international policy will maintain full political autonomy and independence within the principles of mutual respect, non-intervention in the internal affairs of other states, the free self-determination of peoples, and the political solution to international conflicts.
Militant and combattive support to all the revolutionaries in Latin America, te Caribbean and the world who are struggling for their national and social emancipation. In the case of Latin America and the Caribbean, we are conscious that our duty is to contribute to the liberation of the other peoples of our sub-continent within a process which is oriented towards integration in order to progress towards the building of a great homeland.
In this path we put a particular priority on the work and relations with the peoples to whom we are united by a common thousand year history. Diplomatic and economic relations will be developed and maintained with all countries which respect our sovereignty and our juridical sytsm. To struggle for the building of a new international economic order which will replace the currently established one which only benefits imperialism and the highly developed nations to the detriment of those which are held in backwardness precisely because of imperialist domination.
2. The International Situation in Times of Globalization.
(Document of the IV Central Committee – 1997)
2.1 We are living in a period of counter-revolutionary offensive.
In analysing the international situation it is almost an obligation to make reference to the fall the of socialist camp and to its significance for the world revolutionary process. It is clear that the October Revolution had a historic significance for social struggles, demonstrating that the process of social transformation could proceed from the weakest link in the imperialist chain provided that there existed a political organisation capable of understanding and directing the aspirations of the people and of being completely united with them. This link between the party and the people made possible the revolution and the birth of the Soviet Union. The subsequent bureaucratisation and the alienation from the people led to its fall, the defeat of so-called Real Socialism.
Socialism existed as a system, and despite the errors committed in its construction, it brought an improvement in the material conditions of life, access to education and public health, and a dignified life to millions of human beings. This is something that capitalism and imperialism, with all the scientific and technical development that has been attained, has not been able to provide for humanity.
Capitalism, like all class political-economic systems, in the process of developing itself marginalises an important sector of society, condemning it to a life of oppression and exploitation. In the same way, imperialism and its development excludes the majority of countries and submits the peoples of the world to oppression through the policies of colonialism and neo-colonialism. For this reason, capitalism and imperialism do not offer an alternative to the grave situation facing the peoples subjected by colonialism, neo-colonialism and, in the epoch of “gobalisation”, neo-liberalism.
2.2 Capitalism and Socialism
For many years, these two systems – capitalism and socialism – co-existed by means of a tenacious political struggle. The highest point in this confrontation was the second world war, from which socialism emerged strengthened. A socialist camp developed which made it possible for other peoples to liberate themselves from the yoke of colonialism, like China, Cuba and Vietnam. The existence of the socialist camp made it possible for the national liberation movements to benefit from soldiarity support and from a form of strategic rearguard.
The fall of the socialist camp has been a moral victory for imperialism, which presents itself today as the only “alternative” for the peoples of the world. The fall of the socialist camp has brought as a consequence the confusion and fragmentation of leftwing political movements and solidarity movements. In this sense we can affirm that imperialism remains as the only global gendarme, and now, in the absnese of “opposition”, is showing itself in all its agression. For this reason, we affirm that we are living through a period of clear counter-revolutionary offensive.
2.3 Capitalism and its major contradiction
Capitalism has gobalised itself as an economic and political system. That is to say it has imposed itself on the entire world, but without resolving the principal contradiction between capital and labour, between the private form of appropriation of wealth and the social, collective form of the production of this wealth. This results in the existence of markedly differentiated sectors within society – on the one hand a restricted group of families benefit from 80% of the fruits of production, while the great majority have to share the other 20%. This is in the internal sphere, whereas in the international sphere this gives rise to a restricted group of of rich countries, the Group of Seven, while condemning the rest of the countries to poverty. This in turn gives rise to growing discontent among the poor majority of the population, who want to live in dignified conditions and therefore organise themselves in order to demand their rights. Since Big Capital does not want to share its wealth, it resorts to violence to suppress the discontent, without resolving, of course, the principal contradiction.
As a result of its contradictions, capitalism is in a permanent crisis, which at certain moments is transformed into a general crisis. These contradictions grow sharper through the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, which does not mean that profits fall in absolute terms, but rather that these do not correspond to the companies´ expected profits. It is in order to try to resolve this contradiction that capitalism in its imperialist phase over the past 25 years has created neo-liberalism as a way to restore the level of profits at the cost of the increasing impoverishment of millions of human beings throughout the world, converting our planet into a massive concentration camp where day after day thousands of human beings are condemned to death through hunger and exhaustion. Thus, neo-liberalism is nothing more than capitalism in the savage stage of imperialist globalisation. It is neither modernity nor development for the exploited peoples of the world, and still less an alternative to the problems of unemployment and poverty for the workers.
