Victoire Bech | National Association of Communists (ANC, France)

Dear comrades,

We are very glad to take part, here in Dakar, in these three days of exchange, debate and coordination between workers from all countries. These exchanges between anti-imperialist activists from all over the world are more necessary than ever if we are to face the challenges that await us on the long road we still have to travel towards the establishment of a world based on cooperation between peoples rather than on plunder, domination and war.

Our warmest thanks go to the organisers, especially the World Anti-imperialist Platform and the DUP, with whom we have been working for a long time. We would also like to thank the Senegalese comrades who are welcoming us to this country, which, after a long popular struggle and despite repression, has brought to power a coalition whose mandate is the restoration of sovereignty and the general progress of the Senegalese people.

The period we are living through today is full of both danger and potential. Plunged since 2008 into a deep crisis of overproduction that is dragging them irretrievably into recession, the countries of the Western imperialist bloc, of which NATO is the armed wing, are seeing their hegemony increasingly challenged by a group of countries that are politically and economically heterogeneous, riddled with contradictions but rejecting Western domination through debt, pillage and war in all its forms. This group of countries, of which the BRICS are the epicentre, are trying to build new criteria for economic exchanges and new forms of peaceful cooperation that directly threaten the hegemony of the USA and consequently of its European vassals.

To thwart the progress of multilateralism and the inevitable fall in the profit rates of globalised financial capital, the USA and its vassals in the EU, the Fives Eyes and the new Asian NATO, QUAD, are embarking on an operation to destabilise the entire planet through war. With economic sanctions and embargoes, information and cyber warfare, coloured revolutions, coups d’état, etc., they are multiplying their provocations and attacks against all those who refuse their injunctions, fuelling and provoking bloody conflicts, directly or indirectly, as in Palestine and Ukraine.

The more than 55 conflicts underway in the world are all linked to the need of Western imperialist capitalism to maintain its domination everywhere, against the sovereignty and progress of the peoples, which is the only way to save the capitalist mode of production.

Some of these conflicts have already taken on a regional dimension and threaten to become even more widespread, such as the conflicts in Palestine and Ukraine, two strategic nodes for Capital. The multiplication of US provocations in Asia―support for the Taiwanese independence bourgeoisie, the creation of QUAD, NATO’s Asian annex, the permanent installation of US missiles and soldiers in the Philippines, the colour revolutions in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Burma, etc., with the sole aim of thwarting China’s rise to power―leaves open the risk of an open conflict devastating the peoples of the whole world.

In this permanent state of war that Western imperialism is collectively fuelling and intensifying, Africa is not left behind. Conflicts are raging in many countries: massacres of the people of the DRC by militias supported and financed by Rwanda, for the benefit of Western multinationals, the partition of Sudan under the shell of the USA eager to get its hands on the oil reserves of the South and to weaken a government increasingly close to China and more and more hostile to Israel, the bombing of Libya and the assassination of Gaddafi by a Franco-American coalition (leading to a significant deterioration in the security situation in the Sahel and the emergence and strengthening of various armed groups which are stepping up the number of massacres and atrocities against civilian populations, some of them openly supported by France), and so on.

In return, people all over the world are fighting back against this domination by NATO and their comprador bourgeois allies. This is also the case in Africa, where a new wave of struggle against imperialism is underway, with the emergence of a pan-Africanism of combat, resolutely anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist, based on mutual and peaceful cooperation between peoples, in which the African communist and progressive forces play a fundamental role. So it was with great hope that we saw the governments of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger drive foreign armies and companies, particularly French, out of their territories, build the ESA and announce a unilateral exit from the CFA franc. Similarly, we are following with great interest the popular movements that are flourishing all over the continent, in Chad, the Central African Republic and Kenya, some of which have led, as in Senegal, to the election of a sovereignist and progressive government.

For us, being here in Dakar, among so many African anti-imperialist activists, has a special resonance, for obvious reasons: France is the country that subjugated many of your people and reduced them to slavery and forced labour for many years. Today it still claims to perpetuate its domination of your economies through control of the currency, unfair and unequal cooperation agreements and all the hybrid wars of which Western countries have become experts. An imperialist power in decline, competing with its allies and subservient to the imperialist EU, it remains a colonial power in all the so-called ‘overseas’ departments and territories, not hesitating to use force to preserve the crumbs of its ‘empire’, as in New Caledonia, where it savagely represses the legitimate aspirations of the Kanak and Caldoches peoples for self-determination. Moreover, as a member of NATO’s integrated command and the 2nd biggest arms exporter in the world, France is a link in the Western imperialist pole.

It also has a particular resonance because of the very strong presence of the African diaspora in France, as a result of waves of mass immigration throughout the 20th century. The migration movements that took place in the twentieth century, organised by capital and the result of imperialism that severely impoverished the African peoples, have permanently transformed the composition of French society: today, more than a third of French society is either immigrant or the son or daughter of emigrants. France has become a multicultural society, and our peoples are closely linked: members of the diaspora and their children are our neighbours, colleagues, friends, companions and comrades. However, this massive migration has enabled Capital to import, in part, into France itself, the production relations which prevailed at the time of colonisation, i.e. rates of exploitation of labour force differentiated according to origin, culture or religion, with workers of immigrant origin and their children being statistically more condemned to the most arduous jobs, via subtle mechanisms such as ghettoisation, informal inequality of access to education or public services, etc. This stratification of the labour market rests on the fact that the labour market is more and more stratified. This stratification of the labour market based on structural discrimination has been skilfully exploited by reactionary forces and has created a rift within the working classes themselves.

As anti-imperialist organisations, we have a specific role to play, which is to work tirelessly and by every means possible to weaken our own imperialism and colonialism and to dismantle NATO and the EU. Our role is also to contribute to the disappearance of the institutional and economic racism which underpins our society and which is the result both of the French people’s ignorance of its colonial and imperialist history and of the continuing impoverishment of the working classes of France who, in the absence of political prospects for progress, fall partly into the trap set for them by the bourgeoisie with the creation of an ‘enemy within’ in a context of a general weakening of class consciousness since the collapse of the USSR.

Belonging to the imperialist bloc that is the EU does not protect us from exploitation and the destructive effects of the crisis in the capitalist mode of production. For several decades now, the social rights won by the people through hard struggle have been progressively snatched away from us, sharply eroding our living conditions. Public services, social protection, workers’ rights―everything is under attack: under the pretext of European integration and high levels of debt, austerity is being imposed on us with ever greater brutality. This situation is exacerbating the rift between the people and the ruling classes and increasing the militarisation of repression.

Faced with this situation, the French institutional left is still not up to the task. While its most radical fringe has shown almost unparalleled courage in denouncing the genocide of the Palestinian people, despite the intense media, police and legal repression to which the solidarity movement in France has been subjected, its abstention from the vote on the European Parliament resolution authorising the use of European missiles by Ukraine on Russian territory shows the limits of its analysis of international power relations.

These inadequacies leave the field wide open to far-right forces. Massively supported and publicised by financial capital, which is apparently more and more inclined to consider resorting to fascism to muzzle the legitimate aspirations of the people and silence any dissenting voices―proof of which is Ursula Von der Layen’s statement that far-right forces are in no way incompatible with the values defended by the EU―their ideas, in particular the racism and Islamophobia that are their stock in trade, are dangerously infusing whole sections of the working classes.

So we are at a crossroads and have a lot of work to do. For all that, a popular base for the renewal of genuine anti-imperialist internationalism exists, scattered across a multitude of small organisations. Our duty as communists is to work for dialogue between all these forces and to create with them a vast movement that is internationalist, anti-fascist and, ultimately, socialist, insofar as, for us, only the establishment of socialism conceived as the collective power of the workers over their tools of the trade, their natural resources and the product of their labour will enable us to bring down a capitalist mode of production whose outlets can only be poverty, exclusion and war. This work of rapprochement and unification, which has been in the very DNA of our organisation since its creation in 2016, is beginning to bear fruit. In a few days’ time, the ANC will formalise its merger with the Rassemblement Communiste. This first rapprochement is not an end in itself, but the beginning of a process of bringing together all the components of our class and the organisations that claim to be part of it. In this respect, I warmly welcome the representatives of the PRCF here today, with whom we have been working for a long time in complete fraternity.

We also have to continue our work, with the anti-imperialist organisations of the diaspora, to politicise French youth who, while the genocide of the Palestinian people is in full swing and extending to the Lebanese people, and while repression rages, continue to mobilise to weaken the Western bloc of which Israel is only the proxy in the Middle East. This popular solidarity movement has helped to raise the political awareness of young people of all origins, who, in demonstration after demonstration, continue to demand a fairer world, free of imperialism and capitalism, of which it is only the supreme stage.

In this long struggle that lies ahead, the exchanges that this conference will enable us to have will be of precious help, because to fight our imperialism effectively, we need to know its concrete manifestations and to coordinate with those who are fighting it, wherever they may be. It will be hard, it will be long, it will be painful, but we will get there. Thank you for your attention, dear comrades.

The revolutionary patriots of Québec stand with the African people 

Action Socialiste de Libération Nationale (Québec)

Comrades, allow us to begin our intervention with a quotation from the great African revolutionary Amilcar Cabral, whose life and work we highlight for the 100th anniversary of his birth on this year 2024. The following quotation is taken from the First Tricontinental Conference, held in Havana in 1966, but it is as relevant today as it was then. 

“Our presence is a cry of condemnation of imperialism and a demonstration of solidarity with all peoples who wish to banish the imperialist yoke from their homelands. But we firmly believe that the best proof we can give of our anti-imperialist stance, and of our active solidarity with our comrades in this common struggle, is to return to our countries, to develop the struggle still further, and to remain faithful to the principles and aims of national liberation.” 

Comrades, we of the Action socialiste de libération nationale du Québec consider that the destiny of the Quebec people, in its struggle for national independence, must be in solidarity with all peoples in struggle. We believe that the destinies of Quebec and Africa are closely linked. Indeed, we share a common enemy: Canadian imperialism. Canada, which was founded on the colonization of the country by the British, and which developed by exploiting and dispossessing the Quebecois, Acadian and Aboriginal peoples, denying them the right to self-determination, has for several years now been extending its claws into the African continent. Canadian imperialism is particularly present through its mining companies. Just as they once exploited Quebec, its working classes and cheap natural resources, Canadian imperialists are now exploiting Africa and its rich mineral resources. Canadian imperialism is directly involved in the maintenance of neo-colonialism, the denial of concrete (not formal) national independence and popular sovereignty. Canada is as guilty as France or the United States of the state of dependence and over-exploitation in which Africa and its populations currently find themselves. Indeed, in 2022, Canadian assets in the mining sector amounted to C$13.921 billion for 39 companies in West Africa, and C$37.04 billion for 98 companies in Africa as a whole (1). This gargantuan transfer of value is orchestrated by the following Canadian imperialist rapacious companies: Tenke Mining Corporation (Vancouver), Melkior Resources Inc (Ottawa), Banro Corporation and Barrick Gold Corporation (Toronto) (2). to name but a few. Most of the time, this is done without any regard for the fundamental human rights of the exploited: health, safety and dignity (3). Resources that should be used to develop national economies and improve the material living conditions of Africans are appropriated by a handful of foreign mining companies. 

As independence fighters and Marxist-Leninists, we don’t see our struggle for national liberation from a narrow nationalist point of view. Of course, we fight for our people and their working class. But our struggle is part of a revolution on a global scale, embodied in a mosaic of national struggles by people the world over. Each victory won by a people strengthens our conviction and our will to fight to the bitter end. The popular victories in Burkina Faso, led by Captain Traoré, in Mali, in Niger, and right here in Senegal, are deeply inspiring examples for us: they show us that imperialism and neo-colonialism are not invincible, that peoples must not cease their struggle, because victory is possible. Imperialism is weakening, a sign that we must redouble our efforts. The heroic Palestinian people, who are resisting a genocidal war by the Zionist entity, and the people of Yemen and Lebanon, who are fighting alongside them, are equally inspiring, heralding the renewed unity of the great Arab nation for its liberation. The tendency of Russia and China to increasingly support the resistance is also very encouraging. We who live in the heart of an imperialist country see our own struggle as a second front to the African, Arab, Latin American and Asian struggles. Our own victory will be a terrible blow to North American imperialism, which will see its foundations shake and explode. As Canadian imperialism loses strength on its own territory, the peoples of Africa will be all the stronger in the face of an enemy weakened by the instability and crisis of capitalism and colonialism that Quebec’s independence will create. The fight for independence in our country will have to be increasingly directed in an anti-imperialist direction, leading us to break free from the imperialist chain and the capitalist economic system, and to join the majority camp of Humanity, which, from the contradictions of the old world, based on servile submission and exploitation, is bringing about the emergence of a new world, based on sovereignty and cooperation. Our African brothers have shown us that purely formal independence does not liberate the nation, that colonialism becomes neo-colonialism and continues to dominate the people through its indigenous agents. The people of Quebec, like the people of Africa, must win their political AND economic independence if they are to achieve genuine national liberation. 

Let us live by the teachings of comrade Amilcar Cabral! Long live the struggle for African unity!

Long live free Québec! 

Down with imperialism! Down with neo-colonialism! 

Homeland or death! We shall overcome!