Joint Statement of Ray O. Light Group (USA) and El Comité de Organización Marxista-Leninista (Spain)

ROL and CO-ML
Fall 2002

In the fall of 2002, a fraternal meeting was held between ROL of the USA and CO-ML of Spain. The several day bilateral meeting was marked by a spirit of proletarian warmth and solidarity and a high degree of ideological agreement that included the following:

1. The path of working class emancipation remains, as in Lenin’s time, socialism leading to communism through the dictatorship of the proletariat. This path is not in opposition to but presupposes a first bourgeois-democratic stage of the revolution, prior to the socialist stage, in countries where semi-feudal conditions, fascist regimes, etc. make such a first stage appropriate and necessary in order for working class emancipation to unfold.

2. The main enemy of the international proletariat and the oppressed peoples of the world is "imperialism, headed by U.S. imperialism." This fact takes into account that on a world scale US imperialism is still the main bastion of world capitalism. It underscores the fact that popular mobilization of the oppressed and exploited of the earth should be focused upon opposition to "Bush’s War". It also reflects the fact that the European Union represents a powerful and developing imperialist bloc which currently remains subordinate to US imperialism but which is striving either as a bloc (or as a united force of several powerful European imperialist countries) to gain independence and ultimately dominance among the imperialist powers of the world. Within the European imperialist bloc, Spanish imperialism is promoted and supported by such more powerful imperialist countries as France and Germany so as to provide European imperialism with a beachhead, a market, in the Western Hemisphere, that is, in the "backyard of US imperialism itself", among the millions of Spanish speaking working people and masses of Latin America. The prominent political-economic role of the Spanish telecommunications industry in Latin America is noteworthy in this regard. The active role of Spanish imperialism in the US imperialist-led Plan Colombia also reflects its dual character as both an ally and rival of US imperialism.

3. The focus of popular mobilization world-wide is quite rightly against the Bush-led, U.S. imperialist-led war of terror against the world’s peoples. This war has wreaked terrible destruction on Afghanistan, and through the Israeli settler state against the Palestinian people. It has led to the massive introduction of US troops, tanks, planes, bombs, etc. into all the sultanates surrounding Iraq and Saudi Arabia. The criminal US air mastery over Iraqi airspace has maintained the condition of decimated Iraqi infrastructure which has directly led to the deaths of up to a million Iraqi children under the age of five during the little more than a decade since the last US war on Iraq "officially" ended. Today a US dictated war against Iraq seems inevitable.

4. What has been largely buried in the world capitalist print and TV media, controlled by US imperialism, is the fact that Bush’s War has already also meant the intensification of the Plan Colombia and war against the Filipino peoples. The US led war against FARC and the other national liberation movements of the Colombian people is aimed at all the peoples of the Andean countries which are now in various stages of revolutionary ferment. On the other side of the earth, in Southeast Asia, the US imperialists began what even they termed "a second front" (after Afghanistan) in the Philippines. US combat troops, including hundreds of Special Forces, have been sent into the Southern Philippines where both the Communist Party led New Peoples Army and the Moro peoples liberation movement have been waging armed struggle against the US puppet troops of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. We believe that the struggles for national liberation and socialism in Colombia (and the Andean Region) and the Philippines (and Southeast Asia) need to be linked.

In one of the most blatantly arrogant maneuvers, thus far, in early August 2002, obviously without prior consultation with the Arroyo puppet government, Bush’s Secretary of State Colin Powell announced that the New Peoples Army (NPA) and the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) are "terrorists". Obediently, Arroyo, several days later, echoed the US charges---virtually destroying the internationally recognized peace talks between the Government of the Philippines (GRP) and the National Democratic Front (NDF) which is led by the CPP and allied with the NPA. (Arroyo’s own Vice President is still defending the CPP-NDF-NPA as non-terrorists and patriots.) Shortly thereafter, the Dutch government obediently obeyed the dictates of US imperialism and declared that the CPP, NPA, and Jose Maria Sison, the chief political consultant to the NDF in the peace talks and acknowledged founder of the CPP, were all terrorists and the Dutch government froze the small bank account of Sison who has been living in political exile in Holland for many years. In late October, meekly bowing to the Bush regime, the European Union declared that the NPA and Sison (but not the CPP) are terrorists.

We affirmed that we will support efforts, including those by the International League of Peoples Struggles (ILPS) to defend comrade Sison’s rights in Europe and that we will give proletarian internationalist support to the important ongoing national liberation movements in Colombia and in the Philippines against the Bush war machine.

5. We recognize the importance of the national question internationally and specifically its impact on the revolutionary path within Spain and the USA. Within the USA, we recognize the revolutionary significance of the Afro-American national question, especially as it relates to the territory of the Black Belt South. Within the Spanish state, we recognize the central importance of the Basque national question to the proletarian revolution in Spain. We understand that the national question is dialectically connected to proletarian internationalism.

6. Recognizing the relationship between nationalism and internationalism, finally, we have unity of views on the importance of the establishment of a new Communist International (CI) at the earliest possible moment on a realistic and sound proletarian internationalist basis. We recognize the extremely positive and valuable work of the Third International during its approximately 25 year existence which ended with its dissolution in 1943, evidently as a condition for an opening of the second front in World War II. And we recognize the vital importance, in the time of "imperialist globalization", which is still the era of imperialism and the unfolding proletarian revolution, of a Communist International capable of uniting all the struggles of the international proletariat and the oppressed peoples and isolating imperialism, headed by US imperialism so as to usher in a new and powerful socialist era, leading to communism.

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