Athens Meeting 18-20 November 2005, Contribution of CP USA
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From: SolidNet, Tuesday, November 29, 2005
http://www.cpusa.org/ , mailto:international@cpusa.org
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International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties
"Current Trends In Capitalism: Economic, Social And
Political Impact. The Communists' Alternative"
Athens, 18-20 November, 2005

The Communist Party USA expresses its appreciation to the
Communist Party of Greece for hosting this important
international gathering, and we also express our solidarity
with the communist and workers' parties of the world.

The United States is going through one of the most
politically turbulent periods in recent memory. The
administration of George W. Bush is facing a profound
crisis of legitimacy.

Less than a year after he narrowly won re-election, the
Bush presidency is reeling, with a big majority of the U.S.
public saying they do not trust him and disagree with his
policies. What are the reasons?

* The Iraq war: The administration was able to sell the war
using post-Sept. 11 fear. But the war has now been fully
exposed to the American people as a disaster, based on
lies. A majority now say they want an exit strategy to
bring U.S. troops home. The administration is being
discredited with the indictment and continuing
investigation of top officials over their criminal
machinations to sell the war to the public. It is also
embroiled in a series of other scandals.

* Hurricane Katrina: The American people were deeply
shocked by the callousness and incompetence of President
Bush and his administration following the storm that
devastated the historic city of New Orleans and the coast
of the Gulf of Mexico, leaving over 1,000 dead. More
profoundly, this disaster, with its televised images beamed
around the world, starkly revealed to all Americans the
persistent systemic racial and economic inequality in our
country and the inhuman, racist policies of this
administration. They saw how thousands of people, mostly
Black, poor and elderly, were literally abandoned by the
government. To this day, hundreds of thousands remain
displaced, with no home and no income.

* Skyrocketing oil and gas prices have outraged the public,
causing financial hardship, with many low-income people
facing a winter heating crisis.

* Bush's effort to privatize Social Security sparked mass
grassroots opposition.

* There is wide unease over the economy and growing concern
over the multi-billion-dollar price tag for the Iraq war,
combined with Bush's sharp cuts in social programs and tax
giveaways to the rich.

These factors are fueling increasingly open splits in the
ruling class and its political representatives, even within
the right. Some worry that the extreme, reckless policies
of this administration could endanger the interests of U.S.
capitalism.

This is not just a crisis for the politicians now in power
in Washington, but for the entire "neo-conservative"
project that dates back 25 years to the Reagan
administration. That project involved a group of far-right
ideologues, representing the most extreme right-wing
sections of U.S. transnational corporations, who sought to
counter the setbacks experienced by U.S. capitalism in the
1960s and 70s.

Those setbacks included most notably its defeat in Vietnam,
and the accompanying rejection of imperialist war by the
majority of the American people, but also the success of
the Cuban Revolution and failure of the U.S. efforts to
crush it, and other successful national liberation
struggles, the continued influence of the socialist bloc of
nations, and major democratic advances won by the mass
progressive upsurges within the U.S. the civil rights,
women's rights, labor and environmental movements
including enactment of federal social welfare programs and
some curbs on corporate prerogatives. All these were seen
by this neo-conservative group as threats to the
untrammeled domestic and global dominance of U.S. monopoly
capitalism, occurring in the context of a slowing down of
the U.S. and world capitalist economy.

This group gained unparalleled political power with the
current administration, controlling both the White House
and Congress, and seeking to entrench itself in the courts.

The policies of this neo-conservative project are
characterized by:

* deregulation of the economy, privatization of the public
sector
* attack on government as an instrument for the social
good, seeking to transform it into a repressive
redistributive mechanism openly serving the wealthiest
families and corporations
* attack on civil liberties and rights, democratic
structures, especially voting rights, and labor rights
* exacerbation of class, racial and ethnic inequality
* militarism, unilateralism, preemptive war projection of
the U.S. as the sole global superpower
* ideology of fear, national chauvinism, racist, ethnic and
gender chauvinism, backward religious fundamentalism,
merging of religion and state, attack on science.

They strive to roll back the expanded definitions of
democracy achieved in the U.S. over the past two centuries.

The crisis of the Bush administration and the
neo-conservative ideologues takes place in the context of
their foreign policy failures and emerging shifts in the
world balance of forces. The U.S. cannot exercise global
hegemony unimpeded.

Their most glaring disaster has been the Middle East. Their
unilateral preemptive war policy has yielded disastrous
results in Iraq and fueled terrorism and reactionary
sectarian trends. It has left the U.S. isolated in the
world community.

Their open or silent support for the Sharon government's
illegal occupation and aggressive repression of the
Palestinian people has set back efforts to form an
independent, viable Palestinian state living peacefully
alongside the Israeli state, and has fueled anger
throughout the region.

In Europe the U.S. faces imperialist rivalries and a
potentially competing power bloc.
U.S. efforts to impose neo-liberalism in Latin America are
in trouble, with country after country moving to the left.
The Venezuelan people defeated U.S. coup attempts, although
we know that the Bush administration actively seeks to
destabilize not only the Chavez government but also that of
Lula in Brazil, and continues efforts to destroy socialism
in Cuba.

Of growing significance is the rise of the "middle powers"
such as Brazil, India, South Africa, Canada and others,
challenging U.S. imperialism in a number of ways.
Finally, the emergence of China as a dynamic global
economic and political power presents an enormous new
challenge to U.S. and world imperialism.

The U.S. economy is fragile and beset with contradictions.
The budget deficit has jumped to unprecedent levels, with
an enormous foreign debt. The share of U.S. exports in the
world market has declined sharply, while the country relies
increasingly on foreign government purchases of dollars.

The deficit has largely gone not to fund investment in
technology or increased productive capacity, but for import
of consumer goods and for military spending. About a third
of U.S. manufacturing capacity is idle, for the fifth
consecutive year. This is the first time since the 1930s
that so much capacity has been unused for so long.

Meanwhile, new production facilities are built elsewhere
and outsourcing to non-union supplier firms abroad
continues.

While U.S. gross domestic product has remained stable, this
stability has been gained in good part through deepening
attacks on the living standard of workers and the racially
and nationally oppressed as well as through record
consumer debt, military spending and big tax cuts for the
rich, some of which is used for luxury consumption.

Basic sectors of the U.S. economy like airlines, steel and
auto, including icons of U.S. capitalism like Ford and
General Motors, are sharply downsizing their workforce,
laying off tens of thousands. They have used corporate
takeovers and bankruptcies, or the threat of these, to
divest themselves of worker pension and health care
obligations on which generations of American workers have
relied.

Accompanying the disappearance of unionized manufacturing
jobs has been an unprecedented growth in low-wage jobs and
the dramatic expansion of the financial sector to a
position of dominance in the overall economy.

At the same time corporate profits are at boom levels,
aided by government policies.
Thus we are seeing a major disconnect between economic
indicators such as GDP and profits, and the conditions of
life for working people. The U.S. is experiencing widening
inequality, increased poverty and a growing sense of
insecurity among broad sections of the population. This
represents a profound break in the way of life that
millions of working people had become accustomed to.

Big sections of the U.S. labor movement have been adjusting
their thinking and actions to these new conditions. New
levels of consciousness have emerged on the need for
racial, ethnic and gender unity and for independent
political action.

The labor movement is building new alliances with people's
organizations, especially those of the African American,
Latino and other racially and nationally oppressed peoples,
immigrants, women, youth, gay, lesbian and transgendered
people, and environmental groups. Unions are emerging as
champions of the whole working class and other social
strata and movements. Despite the recent split in the
national labor federation the AFL-CIO, trade unionists on
the ground see the need for unity and are working together.
We believe this trend will continue and strengthen, locally
and nationally.

For U.S. unions, as those of other countries, to make gains
in the face of corporate globalization, it is increasingly
clear that greater international trade union cooperation
and coordination is necessary. Initiatives are being taken
in this direction, and we believe communist and workers'
parties can play a big role in helping to advance this
trend. The slogan "Workers of all nations unite" has never
been more timely than today.

Likewise, greater cooperation by communist and workers'
parties can help advance internationalist solutions on
trade and agriculture that address the problems of
developing nations and build solidarity among workers and
rural peoples of all countries.

In the past, the U.S. labor movement has avoided publicly
opposing the government on foreign policy. But at its
national convention in July, the AFL-CIO unanimously passed
a resolution calling for a prompt end to the occupation of
Iraq. This was a historic indicator of profound shifts in
the thinking of American workers.

There is growing mobilization and unity of progressive
forces around ending the U.S. occupation of Iraq, and on
defeating the ultra-right.

Some 300,000 Americans demonstrated in September demanding
the troops be brought home from Iraq. Many of these people
had never attended a demonstration before. Recently more
than 1,000 peace vigils were held around the nation to mark
the 2,000th U.S. death in Iraq. Polls show a majority want
the money now spent on the war to be transferred to
rebuilding the region devastated by the recent hurricanes.

This public mood has pushed some Democratic Party members
of Congress to introduce legislation demanding an "exit
strategy" from Iraq with timetables, or cutting off funds
for deployment of troops to Iraq. Such calls, joined by
some Republicans, are likely to grow as pressure from the
people mounts.

Bush's Social Security privatization plan has been
defeated, at least for now, by the mass grassroots
mobilization of labor, retirees and other people's
organizations.

The Communist Party USA is deeply involved, and welcomed as
activists and leaders, in all of these movements. We
believe that this growing broad unity and grassroots
activity must and will be expanded to thoroughly defeat not
only the current administration's programs but the whole
far-right effort to entrench itself in power.

We see the all-people's movement to defeat the ultra-right
as a vital step toward building a broad anti-monopoly
coalition that will challenge the rule of transnational
monopoly capital. Through the struggle for an anti-monopoly
platform and government in the United States, we believe,
the American people will see that socialism is not only a
better way of organizing society, but a necessity. At every
stage of the struggle, the core components of the movement
are the working class, the nationally and racially
oppressed and women.

Events in our country and around the world show that the
struggle for socialism is intertwined with the fight for
democracy, for multi-ethnic, multi-racial unity and gender
equality, for education and democratic, secular culture.

Finally, in the last 12 months the South Asian tsunami,
hurricanes and earthquakes have demonstrated that nature is
a force to be reckoned with. In the past communists spoke
of "mastering" nature. But we cannot conquer nature. The
struggle for socialism must include an insistence on
acknowledging and understanding the power of nature and
working in harmony with it.

These natural disasters sharply expose the vast social and
economic inequalities globally and within individual
countries. They show that capitalist societies are
incapable of protecting and rescuing their people, and that
capitalism itself makes humanity less secure. They
underscore the human necessity for socialism.