by Dimitris Konstantakopoulos (*)
Dear friends and comrades,
I want to thank you and congratulate you on your initiative to organize this long-overdue conference. I especially want to thank comrades Babakov, Prilepin, and Katsioulas for the energy and time I know they spend for its success.
The Delphi Initiative for the Defense of Democracy, which I represent here, was born from the conviction that none of the major issues of today can be addressed at a national or even regional level. They are global by nature. Nor can they be addressed by states alone. To address them, they require the entry of mass movements onto the stage of History. Hence the need for a new International, which our comrade Samir Amin called the Fifth, or which we can call the Sovintern. A global challenge must be met with a global counter-challenge.
I am particularly happy that this Conference is taking place in Russia. Speaking the year before last at the Valdai Club, President Putin himself emphasized the international significance of the Russian Revolution. Indeed, the Revolution of 1917 was the first major response of the global socialist and workers’ movement to the phenomenon of Imperialism, that is to say, the policy by which Capitalism has been attempting to resolve its crisis since the 19th century.
Imperialism is not a coincidental, accidental feature of the global capitalist system. It is a systemic, organic feature of it, necessary for its very survival.
The first country that understood this and reacted to it was Russia, because it could not develop within the given framework that capitalism had shaped. This is what made the Russian, the Chinese, and the anti-colonial revolutions that followed both necessary and possible.
Russia learned the same lesson the hard way, at the end of the last century, observing the results of the unprecedented, unbelievable concessions that both Gorbachev and Yeltsin made to the West.
In 1991, the captains of international finance capital briefly believed that we were living through the end of History, that they could impose their global Empire, the Empire of Finance and US arms, by generalizing a system of parliamentary pseudo-democracy, with the force of the Western capitalist, political, economic, and social paradigm. They hoped that the introduction of Western capital and values into China would trigger a Chinese perestroika evolving into a katastroika, overthrowing the regime of the planned economy. They hoped that Russia would continue on the path of disintegration. They hoped that no class, nation, or state would challenge their power.
That did not happen. We witnessed the survival of the Chinese regime and the fantastic development of China, the return of Russia, the rise of the South, and the economic and political crisis within the West itself. And this is what forces imperialism, under the leadership of Trump and Netanyahu, to change course and return to the old methods of Fascism and War. No more UN, no more international law. The force of the powerful, the will of the Dictator becomes the ultimate law. And we see the Azov militia in Ukraine, the Palestinian genocide, Lebanon, Syria, Venezuela, Iran, Cuba etc. The Trump–Netanyahu duo appears to be following a variation of Hitler’s strategy in the beginning of WWI. Hitler conquered all of Europe before attacking Soviet Russia: the current pair seek to control all strategic points on Earth before attacking Russia and China.
We know from History that similar phenomena are not dealt with by tactical maneuvers and appeasement. They require the most decisive struggle, and I hope that the Sovintern will contribute to this.
The heroic resistance of the Iranian people to the imperialism of the US and Israel offers a historic opportunity for the anti-imperialist forces to go on the counter-offensive, before these powers manage to stabilize the situation. History will not forgive us if we do not use it.
Of course, Imperialism is the child of Capitalism. You cannot confront it if you do not oppose an counter-vision to Capitalism itself. This is why we need to redefine what socialism can be, to discuss ecology and artificial intelligence, among other things. Conferences need to be held precisely on these issues. And we need to express, in the strongest possible way, in words and deeds, our solidarity with the Palestinians and Lebanese, with the Iranians and with the Cubans. They need it!
(*) This is the text of the speech given by Dimitris Konstantakopoulos in the historic Hall of Unions in Moscow on April 27, during the conference for the creation of a global network for the left of the 21st century under the name Sovintern. The Delphi Initiative, responding to the invitation received from the socialist party “Fair Russia,” agreed to participate and critically support this initiative, convinced of the need for dialogue between the forces of the left globally, but especially between the Russian left and the international left. It is impossible to overestimate the importance of such a dialogue today.