Greetings for the New Year of 2018: Unite to Fight Back against the Reactionary Offensive of the Ruling Class!

 

A Letter from the International Secretariat of the Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (RCIT), 30.12.2017, www.thecommunists.net

 

 

 

Dear Comrades, Brothers and Sisters!

 

The Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (RCIT) sends its New Year greetings to all revolutionaries fighting for the overthrow of the capitalist world order.

 

Likewise, we send our sincerest greetings to all all our brothers and sisters around the world who are fighting against exploitation by bosses, reactionary dictatorships, and imperialist wars and occupation!

 

Comrades, Brothers and Sisters! Behind us is a year full of murderous campaigns and outrageous reactionary attacks of ruling class against the working people. To give just a few examples:

 

* The reactionary killing machine of Assad, the theocratic regime in Iran, and imperialist Russia are continuing the slaugther of the Syrian people. All this is done with the support of the Western imperialist powers.

 

* Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israels capital is an unprecedent provocation to the Palestinian people, the Arab and the Muslim world as well as all progressive forces.

 

* In Yemen, the Saudi-led coalition – with the support of the Western imperialists – are killing thousands of civilians. Their total embargo of the country has created famine as well as a cholera epidemic!

 

* The slavery of Africans in Libya – a result of the imperialist migration policy of the European Union – demonstrates once more the barbaric reality of modern capitalism.

 

* Likewise we witnessed the electoral fraud in Kenya, the military coup in Zimbabwe and the desperate clinge to power by the totally corrupt ANC government in South Africa.

 

* In Myanmar we had to witness the mass murder and ethnical cleansing of the Rohingya minority by the pro-imperialist regime.

 

* In Brazil and Argentina, the right-wing governments attack the long-standing labor rights as well as the social security system.

 

* In Honduras, the corrupt and authoritarian regime of Hernandez, with the support of the US Administration, imposed a curfew and mobilized the police in order to smash the militant protest movement.

 

* In Europe, the conservative Rajoy government in Spain – with the tacit suport of the imperialist EU – is openly suppressing the wish of the Catalan people to have their own state.

 

* In the US, the arch-reactionary Trump Administration is continuing the attacks on migrants, workers and enviromental standards and, at the same time, delivers huge tax breaks for the super-rich.

 

However, the workers and oppressed have demonstrated their determination to fight back. It is them to whom we send our greetings of solidarity and with whom we wish to work together in order to stop the imperialist beast!

 

In Palestine, the glorious workers and youth – who successfully defended Gaza against the Israeli hi-tech army in 2009, 2012 and 2014 – are about to launch the Third Intifada in response to Trump’s decision on Jerusalem. They are supported by a growing international solidarity movement around the world.

 

In Syria, the heroic resistance fighters – most importantly in Idlib and East Ghouta – are continuing their heroic struggle against Assad, ISIS, the Iranian mercenaries as well as the Russian invaders.

 

In Yemen, the brave popular resistance still holds out against the aggression of the al-Saud gangsters.

 

In Kenya, the masses are opposing the corrupt Kenyatta regime despite brutal repression.

 

In Somalia the US imperialist and their AMISOM mercenaries have still not succeeded in defeating the popular resistance.

 

In Brazil, the workers and poor peasant organizations have launched mass protests and general strikes against the attacks on their social rights. The same took place in Argentina.

 

In Honduras, the popular masses rebelled against the electoral fraud which even caused sectors of the police to refuse orders to repress the protests.

 

In Mexico, the indigenous and oppressed people are continuing to resist against the state repression and narco-trafficos with building their popular militias (“Policía Ciudadanas y Populares”)

 

In Catalonia, the people have defied the repression of the Spanish state and expressed their determination to have their own state in mass demonstrations, popular referenda and at the elections.

 

Given the historic crisis of leadership, all these struggles are led by non-Marxist forces. However, this is no reason for revolutionaries to stand at the sideline. Quite the opposite, they must join the masses at the barricades and support their struggles and, at the same time, defend their own, revolutiomnary program.

 

We expect a continuation and acceleration of the main lines of contradictions of the present historic period: the reactionary attacks of the capitalists against the workers and oppressed, the attacks of the imperialist monopolies and Great Powers against the oppressed people as well as the rivalry between the imperialist Great Powers (US, EU, Russia, China, Japan). (For an overview of the RCIT’s analysis of the important class struggles around the world, we refer readers to the numerous articles and statements published on our website as well as the RCIT‘s latest World Perspectives, https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/world-perspectives-2017/)

 

We therefore expect in 2018 worse attacks against our class, more chauvinist aggression and more wars. But we are also convinced that these attack will provoke an even stronger fightback by the workers and oppressed. We orientate towards these struggle and seek to build a revolutionary party among the advanced layers of the fighters in these struggles.

 

It is urgent that under these conditions revolutionaries intensify their efforts to unite and advance in building a Revolutionary World Party. Such a World Party should be based on a joint program combining a revolutionary line on all major global political events with a transitional strategy aiming at an internatinal socialist revolution.

 

The RCIT has elaborated in its “Manifesto for Revolutionary Liberation” its contribution to the debate of revolutionaries about such a program. (See https://www.thecommunists.net/rcit-program-2016/) This Manifesto summarizes the RCIT’s analysis of the present world situation, the position of revolutionaries in the most important class struggles today, and the crucial lessons for the upcoming battles.

 

Building such a Revolutionary World Party is crucial given the terrible crisis of leadership which has caused numerous defeats and setbacks in the struggles of the working class and the oppressed. As we have emphasized many times, the tragedy of our times is not the lack of a class struggle, but the fact that the working class and the oppressed are entering these struggles without the appropriate leadership. Instead, the masses are forced to wage their heroic struggle under the leadership of reformists, petty-bourgeois or bourgeois populists, nationalists and Islamists. In short, the decisive problem today is the total lack of revolutionary leadership. Only if revolutionaries succeed with replacing these misguided leaderships with a Marxist leadership, only than will it be possible to overthrow global capitalism and liberate humanity.

 

We urge all comrades, brothers and sisters to study our documents and to contact the RCIT so that we can jointly discuss steps towards closer collaboration in our mutual effort to build the most important instrument of the working class in its struggle for liberation: a new World Party of Socialist Revolution! Let us march forward!

 

Workers and Oppressed, Unite!

Let Us March Together in Fighting against the Reactionary Offensive of the Ruling Class and the Imperialist Great Powers!

Forward in the creation of a new World Party of Socialist Revolution! Forward in building the RCIT!

 

 

 

Revolutionary Greetings,

 

International Secretariat of the RCIT