People's Democracy

Keynote Session of CPGB

Yechury Urges Careful New Analysis

COMMUNISTS have a duty to enrich their analysis of the present phase of imperialism by identifying what is new in the new global situation, CPI(M) Polit Bureau member, Sitaram Yechury, told an international rally organised by the Communist Party of Great Britain in Croydon on October 30.
 

The Communist Party of India (Marxist) international secretary pointed out to the rally, in the presence of CPGB general secretary, Robert Griffiths, that international finance capital was investing around $400 trillion each year at a time when the value of all goods and services amounted to no more than $7 trillion.
 

He said that this contradiction was unsusta-inable and could only lead to a collapse of capital values.
Yechury pointed out that, while financiers could allow humans to be unemployed, they could not allow capital to lie dormant, which is why international finance agencies demand unconditional freedom for capital to circulate.
 

He identified three new developments: the pheno-menon of job-loss growth, where profits increase while unemployment also rises; a sharp widening of inequalities both within and between countries; and a sustained military-political drive to impose imperialist hegemony over the world’s resources.
 

Yechury warned that imperialism was going through a more aggressive phase and that people’s liberation depended on ending the system.
“Capitalism’s internal dynamic is to extract surplus value. There is no capitalism with a human face,” he said, revealing that, in response to TINA (There is no alternative), Indian communists offered SITA (Socialism is the answer.)
South African transport workers leader Randall Howard said that achieving liberation and peace under imperialism, a system based on “greed, exploitation and profiteering” was a pipe dream.
 

He said that adopting millennium development goals was meaningless in the context of an international framework dominated by the major imperialist powers, in which the WTO and the IMF were imposing neoliberalism on developing nations, keeping working people in poverty.
Howard urged his audience to respond to new challenges, adding: “The struggle for socialism must find expression in all that we do.”
 

Young Communist League student organiser Joanne Stevenson said that, while universities claim that communism is dead, “they can’t extinguish the bright flower of communism because it chimes with the experience of young people throughout history.
In a spirited evocation of the league’s historical record, Ms Stevenson pointed out that the YCL is currently involved in the “revitalisation of the peace movement, especially among school and college student.”
 

World Federation of Democratic Youth president Miguel Madeira expressed his pleasure to be in London, where the WFDY was launched 60 years ago, and described how it had surmounted the challenge posed by the collapse of the socialist bloc to hold successful world youth festivals in Cuba, Algeria and Venezuela.
 

(CPGB Press Release dated October 31, 2005)