Opening Speech of the New Communist Party of the Netherlands

Dear comrades,

We would like to welcome all of you to this important ECA teleconference which has as its slogan "Their war destroys everything that their peace left standing. Developments on the battlefields and the communists’ stance on the alternation between imperialist war and peace at gunpoint".

The intensification of inter-imperialist rivalries has triggered a multitude of armed conflicts on our continent, most notably the imperialist war in Ukraine. In the long wake after the overthrow of socialism in the USSR, capitalist Russia and Ukraine, the latter backed by Euroatlantic capital and its interests, have shown the people what the transition to the capitalist mode of production really meant for them: poverty, crises, and now: a bloody imperialist war.

In other parts of the world, the people also bleed for the interests of the monopolies. In the Middle-East we see the ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people by the Israeli state continue, we see  the crimes of the Syrian jihadi government supported by imperialist powers, the suffering of the people of Yemen, and the dangers for the Iranian people who are caught between the fire of their own reactionary government and the threat of US and Israeli imperialist interventions. In Latin America we see that US imperialism shamefully organizes interventions against the people of Venezuela, as exemplified by the kidnapping Nicolas Maduro, and threatens socialist Cuba with war. Our own governments, most of them organized within the imperialist EU, are actively involved in these shameful acts that violate even bourgeois international law, which is only used under pretexts that favour this or that imperialist bloc, by all sides.

In any case, we are living in times where war becomes the “new normal”. The peoples of Europe too are being prepared for larger, more generalized conflicts, and are being told that they have to sacrifice their lives for the profits of European monopolies against Russian monopolies. We communists must organize a resolute struggle against this war drive, the development of the war economy, which can only come at the costs of the destruction of the people’s social rights and the lives and livelihoods.

There can be no pro-people’s “peaceful imperialism”, which is, as we note in the slogan of this conference “peace by gunpoint”. Even in peacetime there is no absence of violence for the people, with their rights and livelihoods crushed daily by capitalism. In this context it is important to note that we cannot simply be against war, from a classless, pacifist point of view, but we must be against the imperialist war, which arises from the very capitalist system, and in understanding that is it possible to eradicate even the possibility of large scale violent conflicts only when we confront the capitalist system itself.

Because wars arise from the very system that we live in itself: imperialism. Each country, alliance, and so on, seek to maneuver themselves within this system, to gain the highest profit for their monopolies at the cost of the working class and other oppressed strata. The escalation of violent conflict, which coincides with the destruction of the people’s social rights, with large scale attacks on the working class, and with the intensification of anticommunism and a more general authoritarian trend, regardless of the colour of the specific bourgeois government that finds itself in power.

In the Netherlands, a country that has not known a war on its territory since World War II, the illusion of a peaceful capitalist system manifests itself. Here, capitalist peace has brought us successive governments, with a new government soon to be installed, which have and will relentlessly attack and erode the rights of the people. To give an example: the to be formed government, which consists of various liberal and Christian-Democratic forces, plans to link the retirement age to life expectancy, which would mean for most people that they would have to work until their late 60s or even 70s. Harsh austerity measures for long-term healthcare, elderly care, mental healthcare, and so on, are codified in the new agreement. At the same time, they propose that the people pay a so-called “freedom tax” which would help fund the Dutch bourgeoisie’s effort to bolster the armed forces, and to be able to conform to the 5% NATO commitment. Indeed, the warning that we communists give to the people, that the new militarization and building of the war economy will come at the cost of their social rights, is fast turning into a reality.

The communists must resolutely confront these measures by exposing the causes of the current conflicts, by linking the struggle against imperialist war and the struggle for social rights with the struggle against the capitalist system. We must also intensify our collaboration as parties in the ECA to further our understanding of the current development in each of our countries, in Europe, and worldwide, to strengthen our struggle against capitalism, for socialism-communism.