Athens Meeting 18-20 November 2005, Contribution of
Hungarian WP
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From: SolidNet, Monday, November 28, 2005
http://www.munkaspart.hu , mailto:mp200@axelero.hu
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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

Speech of Dr. Gyula Th�rmer, President of the Hungarian
Workers' Party,

Dear Comrades,

I want to start by thanking the Communist Party of Greek
for organising this conference. We appreciate your courage
and consequent policy of Internationalism. We are grateful
for your solidarity, which you demonstrated towards the
Hungarian communists in the last months.

We express our thanks to all other parties, standing on our
side in this difficult period. The Reformist-revisionist
forces - with the active assistance of the Hungarian
Socialist Party - wanted to blow up our party and to change
it into a political servant of the Social-democracy. Your
support and solidarity have given us force and confidence
to save the Communist party in Hungary. I told my comrades
on all meetings of the party: take care; it is not only our
business. If we fail to save our party, it will have
immediate negative effect on our comrades in Greek,
Ukraine, Russia, Czech Republic, Romania, and on long term
on all of us.

Please, believe me and tell your comrades at home: we will
never give up Communism. Expressing our deep commitment we
decided to change the name of our party. Last week the
national whole-party vote has finished on this issue. 78%
of our members voted for the new name. Now it is being
registered at the court. We are now the Hungarian Communist
Workers' Party.

Comrades,

Capitalism has changed to a great degree. Never forget that
globalisation opened new perspectives for them. At the same
time its controversies became more obvious and even deeper.
They destroyed socialist systems in Europe, but the
enlargement of the EU has changed into a historical
mistake. It did not solve the problems of the new
EU-members, but created additional problems for the old
ones.

Capitalist forces now go to the East. It is the classical
method of all empires. If you cannot solve your internal
problems at home, you should conquer new territories.
That's what they are doing.

The Communist movement is the only real danger for them.
Not terrorism, on the contrary, they need terrorism. They
use the fact of terrorism and the antiterrorist war for
limiting the political rights of people and to fight
against us. They want to liquidate the Communist movement.
They ban what they can ban, like the red star in Hungary.
They push out our parties from national and local
parliaments and other classical institutions of Bourgeois
democracy, by establishing of limits of five percents and
even more. They use the fact that we do not have money to
be present in the media.

But the worst thing is that Capitalist forces want to
deprive us our believe. Communism is our identity and our
history; and history is our memory which enables us to go
to the heart of the present and the future. If they can
take away our memory they will decide the role we should
play.

Capitalist forces try to buy our leading people and to
create Reformist parties in our movement. The danger lies
in the fact that they target the intellectual,
psychological and moral structure of Communists. They use
all methods of a media, cultural and scientific war which
targets our young generations in particular with the aim of
separating them from their identity, heritage and history
and making them lose confidence in themselves and their
capabilities, and consequently pushing them to surrender to
the illusion that we do not need class fight any more and
there can a compromise with capital.

Comrades,

We fully support this conference in Athens because it is
something new. It is the conference of Communist parties
and it has very concrete purposes. It is what we really
need: the effective and concrete cooperation of the
Communist parties.

We, Hungarian communists want to play an active role in
organising these activities, and we are ready to contribute
to the Solidarity Found.

Please, agree with me: our cooperation is an essential
weapon to fight against Capitalist policy. If we cannot
develop it, we cannot influence the cooperation of other
anti-capitalist, anti-globalist forces. We should and can
become the moving force of all movements against capitalism
because we are basically interested in fighting against
capitalism.

We consider that our new cooperation will be successful if
it responds to the concrete everyday demands of our
parties. We agree to have consultations about actual
international questions with the aim to elaborate common
positions. But it is not enough. Our work will respond our
interests if we can do concrete steps. Let us elaborate a
common strategy of our fight against the new enlargement of
NATO. Let us do it together with the communist parties of
Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus. We should help the fight of
the Communist and workers' parties on the Balkan. We should
help to integrate them into the European cooperation of
communist parties. We should help our Arab comrades to
oppose the rising imperialist pressure in the Middle East.
Let's estimate together the political changes in Eastern
Europe, and to help to save the Communist parties in these
countries.

Comrades, all of us are leaders of political parties. We
know the problems we should solve day after day, and
sometimes we cannot. How to solve the problem of Marxist
education and training of our cadres? How to solve the
material and financial problems of the Communist parties,
how to find international possibilities? How to use
Internet for mobilising our people in Europe and all over
the world? If we do not solve these problems, our general
discussions will lose its essence.

But first of all, we should use this cooperation to confirm
our conviction. We are Communists, we are Marxists, and our
theory is Marxism. It means that we do recognize the
existing of social classes and consequently the theory of
class struggle. We represent and express the interests of
workers, and in the broad understanding of this word- the
interests of working people.

We should not think out theoretical constructions how the
future socialism will look out. We should study the
concrete development of contemporary capitalism, and we
fill find those concrete forms in which future socialism
can develop.

We have serious basis to rely up. It is the historical
experience of the Communist movement in the 20th century,
and not only in Europe. The Chinese communists have great
differences in comparison with the European parties, but
what they do, is Marxism-Leninism in concrete national
practice. Some parties deny or underestimate Chinese
experience. We are convinced that we should study the
theoretical studies of Chinese communists.

It should include a new estimation of the historical place
of Stalin. Our actual estimation of Stalin is based on the
estimation of the 20th Congress of the CPSU. All of us know
that the 20th Congress was not only a brave fight against
Stalinism but also an element of the personal fight of
Khrushchev for power, and this fact deformed the real
meaning of the congress. Our comrades in Russia have made
serious steps to give a new estimation to Stalin. We think
we should study their theoretical and political position
very carefully.

In our understanding socialism is a type of human society
where the economy is based on the majority of collective
forms of propriety, where the power belongs to the people,
and where everybody works according to his abilities and
receives from the produced wealth according to his work.

We can add to these features of socialism a lot of other
elements. These are partly the results of our experience
about former socialism, partly the theoretical consequences
of our perception of contemporary capitalism.

But we should remember that socialism is first of all real
power of people. We are communists if we fight against
capitalism. We should know: there will be no Socialism
without fighting against Capitalism. Capitalists will never
give us power and property.

Now we should work. We should offer new alternatives. It is
obvious that the Hungarian capitalism cannot solve the
basic problems of Hungary. It could not integrate Hungary
as an equal partner to the European Union and the NATO. We
are a colony. It could not solve the historic task to use
in effective manner the talent of the Hungarian people. On
the contrary, we lose our education, healthcare system and
all our human resources.

We are fighting against capitalism in Hungary, and do it in
very concrete forms. Last year we organised a referendum
against the privatisation of hospitals. We collected 300
thousand signatures. In December almost two million people
said "No" to the privatisation. We could not prevent the
privatisation, but we could stop it for some time.

Now we want to do the next step and to come the parliament
in 2006. For the first time in the recent 16 years now we
had real chances. People have disappointed in capitalism,
and first of all disappointed in parliamentarian parties,
which created a regime of corruption, legitimated rubbery,
a country of poverty and social injustice. People are
looking for new alternatives. On the Left side we are the
only party to propose a real workers' program. If we come
to the parliament it will be the first political success of
the Hungarian workers since 1990 in their fight against
capital.

I wish to all of you successes! Thank you!