Above: from the 2025 International Anti-Fascist Forum in Moscow.
In the face of the new provocations that Washington plans to carry out, one of our most important tasks is to reorient the workers movement away from stagnation. From the crude economism that took it over after the USSR fell, a void appeared in socialist politics, and this void got filled by opportunists who are detached from today’s actual proletarian struggle. It’s this ill that’s holding the communist movement back from seeking a serious alliance against fascism and imperialism. And as our enemies escalate their offensive, it’s urgent for us to combat economist dogma, thereby allowing our movement to grow into a force which can defeat the imperial menace.
At this moment, the main problem inside the socialist movement exists within Greece’s KKE, which influences numerous communist parties around the globe towards opposing Russia, China, Venezuela, and all other countries that the hegemon seeks to destroy. The KKE’s camp came to this position because rather than investigating the nature of the present class struggle, they’ve embraced mechanistic thinking, where class struggle is seen as a series of predetermined steps. This error has done real, material harm to the global workers struggle; it’s led the KKE to platform the Trotskyist wreckers within Venezuela’s communist party, who orchestrated a split inside the workers movement by smearing Maduro.
When you approach the working-class cause in the rigid way that the KKE does, and stick with the economistic mentality where nothing matters outside a narrow range of actions, the ranks of your organization will be vulnerable to nonsense; nonsense like the idea that Washington is fighting with rival imperialist powers, or the notion that Maduro is an enemy. It’s these narratives that are threatening to keep the communist movement paralyzed during the next escalations the empire is planning. The upcoming aggressions, as summarized by journalist Jason Zaharis, are going to rely on tricking the world into believing Russia is the one which has escalated:
According to the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), Kiev’s plans involve a staged infiltration of a supposed joint Russian-Belarusian sabotage force into NATO territory in Poland. It will reportedly be carried out the “Freedom of Russia” Legion and the Belarusian “Kalinoŭski Regiment,” both of whom have been fighting on the side of the Armed Forces of Ukraine throughout this war. The plan reportedly will also have the two militias simulating an attack on Polish critical infrastructure to create the appearance of a joint Russian-Belarusian incursion. The SVR reports that the government in Warsaw is aware of the plan and worked with Kiev to jointly develop the plan, through Ukraine’s military intelligence (GUR) and Polish special services. Moscow has also confirmed that the recent drone incursions into the airspaces of Poland and Romania were carried out by the Ukrainian Nazi regime with the goal of triggering Article 5 and drawing NATO’s European members into direct war with Russia.
This comes at the same moment that Washington is threatening to launch a war against Venezuela, which will depend on the left being split over Maduro and unable to seriously defend Venezuela’s revolution. The imperialists will do all they can to inflame these divisions, and the KKE has shown it’s glad to assist in this project.
It’s this aspect about the nature of our enemies, in which they constantly employ as much deception as they need in order to make trouble, that proves why the KKE’s camp isn’t capable of winning the fight against capital. When the most that a communist party does on fighting imperialism is speak against the general idea of war, while making sure to condemn both sides, that party is never going to be a dynamic force in resisting the hegemon.
This is the main reason why the KKE’s position on our third world war must be struggled against: this position keeps the workers complacent in resisting the war maneuvers of their ruling class. Mounting such a consistent and serious resistance against imperialism is paramount; it’s among the central goals that drives any serious communist, which is why communists who oppose the KKE always start our critiques based on whether somebody lives up to that goal.
This is why Dimitrios Patelis, the respected Greek philosophy professor and World Anti-Imperialist Platform contributor, hasn’t just been arguing against the KKE’s position; he’s also ridiculed the Russian bourgeois leadership for holding back military progress in Ukraine. The correct Marxist-Leninist position on Russia’s Ukraine operation is that it’s an anti-fascist war to rescue the Donbass people from ethnic cleansing. And using this pro-resistance logic, Russia’s communist party successfully pressured Putin into taking action against fascist Kiev; but Russia’s capitalist ruling class is of the mindset that the country must reconcile with Washington as soon as possible, and this has led Putin to wage the fight in a compromised fashion. This is the critique of bourgeois “multipolarist” politics that’s put forth by communists: it’s not enough to merely advance multipolarity, we need to commit to defeating the imperial enemy without hope for making “peace” with it.
In both cases, the trend that we seek to combat is stagnation; stagnation in how one views the nature of the fight, and how one wages this fight. To be clear, between the Russian bourgeois leadership and the KKE, the KKE is by far the biggest source of this problem, and the one that deserves our greatest attention. For communists and anti-imperialists outside of Russia, the KKE is also the political force that we can garner the most tangible benefits from critiquing; it’s a party that isn’t in power, as are most of the globe’s other communist parties, and that therefore any communist can credibly argue against so long as they stand on their own business. Putting the ideological struggle against the KKE at the center of our practice is the strategically correct action; and if we advance this struggle properly, it will be able to serve many broader goals, including the fight against non-committal “multipolarism.”
When we truly understand the purpose of combating a wrong idea, we see that efforts to negate this idea must advance an effort at building your own constructive force. What we do can’t just be about negation; the individuals who become fixated on negating one thing are susceptible to getting misled by dogmatic forces like the KKE, which seeks to discredit the anti-imperialist countries by solely emphasizing their internal contradictions. To be productive in our ideological battles against the KKE and its partners, we need to make appeals towards those within the ranks of these organizations; or at least the ones which we can appeal to. Within left-wing politics, essentially every organization has good people in it, and this is something we need to keep in mind.
The KKE and its affiliates have only been able to do so much damage because they’ve hijacked the organizations of the class-conscious workers, who with the USSR’s fall have been left without the international support structures which they’ve relied on in the past. These workers are victims of an imposition onto their institutions by cynical actors, ones which are willing to take advantage of the desperation that the proletariat has found itself in.
Do many of these workers share the opportunistic ideas of their leadership? No doubt they do, but there’s a reason why they do; and many among them may be convinced to change their alignment, or may see their fellow workers come to reject the KKE’s position. Whether we win them over depends on how principled we show ourselves to be; principled not just in our ideological stances, but in our practice. A recent example of such consistency in action was when the American Communist Party’s Haz Al-Din clarified that within the opportunistic Party for Socialism and Liberation, there is a distinction between the leadership and the members. Haz said that “The rank-and-file PSL members are not our enemy,” and we must apply the same mentality to the members of the KKE-aligned parties. This determination to maintain unity, to the greatest extent that we can, is a core part of how we forge the alliance that can thwart Washington’s schemes.
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