New Left Current for the Communist Liberation 5th CONGRESS
The challenge for political intervention in the period: a modern strategy and tactics
1. What is required for political intervention in the present period is a modern strategy and tactics so that the struggles, uprisings, and movements that break out and will break out can be victorious and so that social anger can be transformed into a material force for revolutionary change. For this to happen, the reconstruction and emergence of contemporary workers' politics, in mass terms, and the development of a broader socio-political anti-capitalist current of subversion are required. In this context, formulating a comprehensive communist response is a historical necessity and an immediate task, with the formation of a modern communist programme and a party of communist liberation being a contribution to this cause. The anti-capitalist and communist Left are called upon to contribute to the political objective of a fighting front of the forces of labour, to claim and impose the demands for "bread, work, peace, freedom, international solidarity of workers and people"
2. The realization of the possibility of repelling capital’s attack and achieving victories that will improve the lives of workers and youth but also shape the conditions of social change is determined by:
- The course of the formation of a modern programme and Party of Communist Liberation and an Anti-capitalist Workers' Front
- The formulation of revolutionary tactics that will respond to the critical issues of the period.
The revolutionary path against the parliamentary road
3. No communist hope and perspective can exist, and no workers' power and socialism can be conquered without a contemporary elaboration, promotion, and projection of the necessity and possibility of the revolutionary path in our time. The dialectically developing "permanent revolution" begins with the workers' anti-capitalist revolution, with communist content, and the conquest of workers' power, realizes the leap towards workers' democracy and ends with the victory of communist liberation. Power will either be bourgeois or of the workers, and the overthrow of bourgeois rule will only be realized through a revolutionary path. Even in conditions of a revolutionary crisis in the bourgeois system, where there can exist a dynamic of dual-parallel power before the revolution, with the bourgeois power always dominant, this dual-parallel power cannot last for long. Either capitalist power will prevail, or workers' democracy-power will win.
The experience of the SYRIZA government and the more general relevant experience - both historical and recent (e.g. Latin America) - underline the erroneous character of the concepts that highlight the issue of becoming the government in a bourgeois state as a key link and path for revolutionary transition and cut off the "struggle for government" from the struggle for political power as a whole. They also demonstrate the misguided character of views on the conquest of the bourgeois state rather than its crushing and the creation of a radically new one, with councils being its core in the places of work and residence. In the name of the "continuity of the state", in our country, whenever major revolutionary and subversive struggles have threatened the bourgeois regime, it has not hesitated to resort to violent, counter-revolutionary military and openly dictatorial forms of repression.
The dialectical relationship between the communist programme, revolutionary tactics, and the anti-capitalist framework of struggle
4. A modern programme of communist liberation constitutes a single comprehensive proposal of strategy and tactics, where strategy determines and inspires tactics, and in turn, tactics are articulated and met again with strategy. It is the opposite of the strategic and tactical versions of the bourgeois system. It constitutes a single overall proposal "guided" by the communist content of the essential and definitive solution to the accumulated contradictions and the working people's problems of the new historical era, the abolition of all forms of exploitation, oppression, discrimination, and power. Its success is judged by the emergence of the necessity, the possibility, the realism of global responses, and the impossibility of satisfying even immediate aims of struggle and demands within the present historical period when aims of total conflict with bourgeois politics do not accompany them. It highlights the subject of revolutionary change and the ways of approaching the revolution, the basic characteristics of the society of workers' power on the path to communism, and the subject of this path.
It is the programme to be implemented by the institutions of workers' power, a programme of revolutionary changes to completely overturn the current situation and implement all the radical transformations required during the transition towards comprehensive communist emancipation. The programme of workers' power, in combination with the present needs and experiences of the workers and the stage of class struggle, guides the direction and objectives of the anti-capitalist struggle. These goals are necessary for the improvement of the life of the people today. They are mature, comprehensible and realistic for many workers and youth as immediate goals of struggle and demand, which can be imposed according to the dynamics of the class struggle and the objective possibilities of our times. At the same time, however, they are "unattainable" within the limits of the capitalist system because they can only be realised in their entirety by the workers' democracy and its government, which will be imposed by the workers' anti-capitalist revolution.
Through the Programmatic Declaration, the New Left Current attempts to contribute to an initial formulation of a communist program. In this context, it puts forward the basic features of the revolutionary tactics necessary for this period and the basic anti-capitalist aims of struggle.
The revolutionary tactic
5. The revolutionary tactic must be anti-capitalist in its entirety. Because the workers' and people's goals cannot be met unless capital loses profits, wealth, property and, ultimately, power. A necessary precondition for this is the strengthening of the concept that promotes the need for the working people's movement to be constituted in more comprehensive demands and to express the interests and needs of the working majority from the point of view of materially improving their living conditions and fighting against capital, and not just fighting to prevent the further deterioration of their position. Only from such a starting point can defensive struggles to repel the attack be effectively waged.
At its core is the social question in all its dimensions, which is becoming more acute under the influence of recent developments (war, energy crisis), which give particular importance to the front against inflation, the explosion of poverty, the right to energy, etc. The question of the anti-war internationalist struggle and the struggle for peace of the peoples has become qualitatively upgraded and it must permeate all aspects of the intervention of labour politics and the mass movement. Linking the struggle for the fundamental improvement of the lives of the working people and the poor popular strata with the front against the armaments of war and the military armament programmes. By building an anti-war movement with internationalist characteristics, independent of any side of the clashing bourgeoisies and, first of all of the bourgeoisie of its own country, which is more difficult but also more necessary. By highlighting the upgraded role of NATO and the crucial objective of leaving it and dismantling it.
The struggle for anti-capitalist disengagement from the EU is a decisive link in the contribution of the workers in Greece to the internationalist struggle for the dissolution of European capitalist integration, for another international cooperation for the benefit of the people.
By strengthening the struggle for a total break with the bourgeois state for the conquest of democratic rights and popular freedoms. By building a popular movement for democratic rights and freedoms that will not be limited to the content of a "pan-democratic-anti-right front» but will link it to the social question.
With the fields of struggle against racism, contemporary fascism and gender discrimination and oppression being an organic element.
Against capitalism which is destroying the natural environment like never before and is threatening the conditions of existence of humanity.
The crucial task of the revolutionary tactics of the period is the achievement of a rupture in the present catalytic hegemony of bourgeois politics, with the emergence at the national and international level, of workers' politics as a political rival, which will aim at changing the dynamics in favour of the tendency of workers' emancipation and the leading revolutionary forces. The objectives must be to resist to the capitalist attack, to contribute to the revolutionary situation and to the possibility of leading it to the outbreak of the revolution and its victory.
These necessary goals serve the development of the movement, strengthen the struggles for forming a militant workers' opposition, and can be imposed in the battle. With a united militant proposal of resistance and overthrow of the social and political situation today. For the formation of a united political movement of the workers in alliance with the poor popular social strata and the struggling youth, which can victoriously take on the aggressive, barbaric policies of the government, the EU and Capital.Our priority and goal is to build a broader unity of forces that are not comfortable within the framework of capitalism, that fight for the autonomy of the anti-capitalist Left, far from plans of being a political satellite of neo-social-democratic or communist reformism.
The anti-capitalist program
7. Today the tactical-strategic relationship is more closely knit. The "communist answers", i.e., political objectives that are strategically opposed to the criteria of profit, the market, and private property, are not only historically necessary but also immediately politically necessary, becoming a condition for a decent life and humanity's very survival. Indeed, in the era of the dizzying rise of the productive forces, of artificial intelligence and biotechnology, of the rise of the possibilities of emancipation as a whole, new possibilities will either be put at the service of the working class and thus society will be radically changed for the benefit of the workers, or, remaining under the domination of capital, we will be led to a dystopian society of generalized unemployment and flexible work, of "deeper control" of power over the personality of every human being, of repression and of profound alienation.
Society will either be radically redesigned based on human needs and environmental protection, against private property and commercial capitalist exploitation of space, or climate change, environmental destruction, and housing crash will lead us to the limits of survival. Either the struggle for the global hegemony of capitalist states and multinational organizations will lead to an intensification of wars, or the working class will conquer power by imposing the equal internationalist coexistence of countries, nations and cultures in international relations.
When crisis is omnipresent and capitalism is running out of all its resources, then the revolutionary and communist Left must use and address every issue and question to bring to light and create a program that breaks with the logic of profit, competition, the market, property, the bourgeoisie, its state and its international organizations. This program serves the cause of the people's struggle. This is the anti-capitalist programme of struggle. Contrary to many forces of the left who say that we need to "lower" the goals, to "unite" on the minimum to do "mass politics", the anti-capitalist programme can more than ever be adopted by the broad popular masses. Contrary to the criticism of the anti-capitalist programme that it leads to reformist illusions within capitalism, the anti-capitalist programme and the struggle to impose gains for the workers by imposing parts of it, escalates the class struggle and can lead the communist and worker’s movement to higher phases of struggle up to a revolutionary situation.
8. The basic objectives of an anti-capitalist programme of struggle objectives today are the following:
i. Reversal of the current regime of exploitation of workers with the aim of its abolition. Radical improvement of the position of the workers at the expense of capital. Increases in all wages and collective bargaining agreements everywhere against the needs of bourgeois profits, the EU fiscal slaughterhouse and the stability and growth pacts. No wage-salary below 1,200 euros net, 30% worker wage increase. Cover all the losses of the memoranda (Economic Adjustment Programmes) and inflation—immediate abolition of all memorandum cuts and laws. Make capital lose wealth and property for the workers and people to win.
ii. Reduction of working time: 30 hours - 6 hours - 5 days. No to part-time work, precarious, temporary, flexible working conditions, flexible working hours, extended working hours, subcontracting and the permanent implementation of teleworking. Stable and secure work for all, equal rights for migrant workers. Abolition of unpaid work with severe penalties for employers, struggle against working hours violations, overtime, and intensification.
iii. Exclusively public, free education, health, research, energy, against the laws of the market, with nationalizations and workers' control of these sectors, big business, and banks, without providing compensation to capital
iv. Hit market speculation and control the prices of all goods. Abolition of VAT and all indirect taxes on essentials and foodstuffs. Abolition of excise tax and all taxes on workers. Abolition of energy and food exchanges. No to the tax massacre of small professionals and the self-employed.
v. Protection of people's housing, rent control, and no confiscation of housing and property of the poor working people. Abolition of auctions of people's housing and property and evictions of local people and refugees. Establishment of a legislative framework for the protection of people's housing and the cancellation of debts of the popular classes to banks, the state, municipalities, and funds. Workers' housing programmes. Coverage of student housing needs. Opposition to skyrocketing rents and eviction for Airbnb. Pricing and control on rent increases.
vi. Free public health care. Exclusive public health at all levels. Development and strengthening of the NHS by recruiting permanent staff according to actual needs, with full and exclusive employment. No to privatisation. No businesses and contractors in health care. Measures for humane and healthy conditions in the workplace, in education, in public transport, and in the city. Measures to protect the environment. Measures for safe and high-quality food.
vii. Knowledge - science - education - culture, driven by social needs, liberated from the shackles of commercialization-exploitation, from technocratic logic, metaphysics, with the abolition of class barriers and free access to all levels and forms of education, throughout human life, ensured by measures to support the socio-economically weakest.
viii. For an exclusively public, free, democratic education for all children. With two-year per-school education and a single 12-year school. A multidisciplinary school combining general education, broad humanistic education with scientific and technical knowledge, skills for basic branches of production, cultivating balanced cognitive, artistic, moral, and physical development of children, critical-creative thinking, the ideals of solidarity. With genuine free access to a uniform university education, but also to the public, free vocational training system after the 12-year schooling for those professions that do not require a university education. For a liberating education and a society in which education will emerge from all its aspects and will ensure all material resources, so that each person has access to any part of education they wish, whenever they choose.
ix. Democratic rights and people's freedoms in confrontation with the permanent regime of their suspension, surveillance, prohibitions, police repression, prosecutions, fines, the attempts to abolish the right to demonstrate, to trade union activity and to strike, in break with the state of totalitarian governance.
x. Disobedience and overthrow of the framework of the post-memorandum EU supervision and debt, the deeply reactionary, unpopular conditions and preconditions of the "Recovery Fund". Cessation of debt payments - non-recognition and cancellation of debt.
xi. Total confrontation, anti-capitalist rupture/exit from the EU.
xii. Peace and friendship between peoples. No involvement of Greece in capital’s war in Ukraine and the Middle East. Freedom for Palestine and solidarity with the just struggles of the peoples of the whole world against brutal exploitation and the theft of their wealth. Defeat/reversal of the war campaign of the bourgeoisie, struggle against the brutal war armaments, the imperialist interventions and the reactionary antagonism of the Greek and Turkish bourgeoisie. For dismantling the reactionary, belligerent axis of Greece-USA-Cyprus-Israel and every belligerent alliance in which the Greek bourgeoisie is involved. Out with the bases, out with NATO. No to the Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ), so that the seas do not become a field of conflict of interests of the energy multinationals and the states, as well as an environmental disaster with mining.
xiii. Fight against racism, against fortress Europe, against the unpopular and racist EU-Turkey agreement. Right to asylum, freedoms and open borders for refugees, decent housing in our cities and villages. Full rights to work, education, health, and free movement for refugees and migrants. Abolition of the concentration camps, restrictions on the movement of migrants and refugees, and the ban on crossing borders. No to the murderous pushbacks, deterrence operations, and walls. A front against fascism, racism and nationalism. Collective and organised popular self-defence. Exposing and dismantling the organised raiding mechanisms of neo-fascist and neo-Nazi groups against refugees-migrants and structures of the movement.
xiv. Defending the environment, against the criminal exploitation of the environment by capital, against the plundering of nature and public spaces, against the pollution and “monster” cities that give rise to diseases and pandemics, and addressing the climate crisis, aiming for a harmonious relationship between man and nature. Against the destruction of mountains and beaches in the name of the 'green transition'. No new mining of mineral resources on land and sea. Cancellation of the plans to extract fossil resources in the international seas (EEZ).
xv. Struggle for high-quality food for the people, with the creation-support of primary producer cooperatives of small producers, oriented to the needs of the people, outside the imperatives of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and the EU. Fight against the multinationals that control the food of the whole planet. Public control over the distribution circuit and prices of agricultural products. Decent living conditions in the countryside (education, health, etc.).
xvi. Fight for gender equality. Protection of maternity at work and social benefits, against capital's policy of dismantling social protection structures. No to discrimination based on gender, origin or sexual orientation. Strike against the patriarchal concepts, relations and practices reproduced by the system, dividing the world of work, and leading to the intensification of gender violence, the increase in cases of abuse, femicide and child abuse. Creation public and free legal, psychological, and medical support structures for victims of gender and domestic violence.
xvii. Abolition of official religion, complete separation of church and state. Exclusion of the church from education, confiscation of church and monastic property, and full equality and freedom of religious beliefs.
The relationship between the programme and the socio-political subject
8. The contemporary communist programme, both as a whole and in its anti-capitalist framework of struggle, affects the constitution and development of the political subject of the struggle for liberation from capitalist fetters. The political subject, from today's subversive struggle against bourgeois politics to bring tomorrow's revolution and communist liberation, the abolition of all forms of exploitation, oppression, alienation, and power, is the "class for itself", which fights for the emancipation of itself and the whole society, it is the p olitical movement of the working class and its allies of the exploited and oppressed strata.
An important aspect of its constitution is the building of the working class's alliance with the other, non-proletarian, oppressed strata of the town and village. The working class's interaction-alliance with every category, group, or stratum subjected to other relations of oppression (ethnic, religious, gender, colour, etc.) is indispensable. This constitution is ensured through the intervention of the political vanguards, an intervention with a fruitful character. The vanguards intervene independently, generalizing their experience by enriching their programme in interaction with the workers' diverse radical anti-capitalist tendencies (spontaneous or semi-conscious). The vanguards include - in a dialectical relationship and not in superimposed levels or concentric circles - the party of Communist Liberation (strategic vanguard), the Anti-capitalist political Front, which rallies forces in an all-out confrontation with the main line of bourgeois politics, with a subversive-revolutionary horizon and the anti-capitalist wing of the mass movement. The capacity to promote the communist programme in workplaces r will strengthen the higher constitution of the revolutionary subject, which in turn will feed into the reconfiguration and enrichment of the programme itself.
In the critical political-social period that is taking shape, our choice to form a modern communist programme and organization/party of Communist Liberation is linked to and develops in a dialectical relationship with the building of an anti-capitalist workers' front, the development of a broader current of theory and of the new workers' movement, and the promotion of the class movement for workers' emancipation.
The development of theoretical work is a key element of our qualitative transformation
9. Our choice for the programmatic and organizational constitution of the forces of communist liberation, also highlights the upgraded importance of theoretical-ideological work and intervention. We are aware that such a qualitative leap requires the formation of the "collective intellectual", this collective intellectual being the party of Communist Liberation. Guided by this goal and in the process of forming a new organization, we seek to understand and conquer in practice that theoretical-ideological intervention is not the work of specialists, but a collective task of all. Only if it permeates the whole organization and every member, every action, the daily intervention in the political struggle and the unfolding-effective development of the struggles, only if substantial steps are taken in the theoretical “equipment” of all members can we achieve the necessary leap. It is highly necessary to combine fundamental Marxist views with the process of their bold development based on the present reality of the working class and the class struggle as a whole, at the national and international level.
The creative study and development of Marxism is necessary in all the fields involved:
- The developments, trends and processes in contemporary capitalism. This requires a fruitful combination of fundamental Marxist views with their enrichment/development both in classical fields (production-economy, globalization, state, working class, etc.) and in new ones (digital reality, social relations beyond the immediate process of production, culture in the broad sense, environment, gender discrimination, etc.).
- The militant and effective confrontation with bourgeois ideology and all its variants (liberalism, irrationalism, far-right and modern fascism, postmodernism, individualism, religiosity, racism, etc.), as well as with reformism of every type, social democracy, and anarchism.
- The study and elaboration of critical tactical and strategic issues, their connection with contemporary conditions, the deeper programmatic elaboration of objectives and organs of struggle, as well as the theoretical elaboration of the social and political front.
- The upgrading of our theoretical work on the issues of culture and art.
- The scientific study and the development of mass theoretical-political action on the historical course of the revolutionary communist movement, as well as on the connection of the project of communist revolution with the revolutionary class tendencies that attempted a revolutionary transcendence of the traditional communist currents.
WE ARE TAKING THE FIRST STEP TOWARDS A COMPREHENSIVE STRATEGIC RESPONSE In the face of the modern barbarism of capitalism, which intensifies exploitation to the utmost and leads humanity to unforeseen new adventures, the only way to defend life, rights and freedoms is through revolution and communism.
We are contributing as much as we can to this case from our side. With hope drawn from the struggles that are developing all over the world and in our country, with an awareness of the new difficulties, with the will to confront the chronic weaknesses, delays and shortcomings of the communist movement, we advance the project for a new victorious, workers' movement and the reconstruction of the revolutionary, anti-capitalist communist left, the current and movement of communist liberation that will open the roads of revolutionary subversion. We are advancing the procedures for the formation - in 2024 - of a new communist organization, together with those who contribute to the Initiative for a Modern Programme and Party, taking the first step towards a new Programme and Party of Communist Liberation.