Financialization, militarization and fascization are the characteristics of imperialism described by Lenin a century ago as the « supreme stage of capitalism ». Financialization has never been so far removed from production, war is increasingly necessary for finance capital to appropriate profits and gain access to resources, and fascization is re-emerging as the political form capitalism needs to impose its domination on the people.

It’s not just the neo-Nazis in Eastern Europe, not just the far-right forces in Germany, Italy, Denmark, Spain and France, not just the ultra-liberal populist leaders in Argentina and Paraguay, It’s the whole of globalized capitalism, which knows that it cannot maintain its power in the formal democracy of the last century, that it cannot propose compromises that guarantee the maintenance of social rights and progress for the majority. It needs authoritarian, massively reactionary regimes, and it needs to shatter all popular unity by organizing divisions of all kinds : racist, urban, generational, societal.

Communists have a particular responsibility in this drift towards the far right. They are the ones who refused the First World War, they are the ones who defeated Nazism through the Soviet victory and their place in the resistance, they are the ones who showed that another society was possible, a socialist society, not ruled by the bourgeoisie, even if it takes diverse historical and national forms.

The choice of peace, the refusal of the war our country is preparing, are essential choices to resist the far right, the fascization of ideas, to unite peoples !

We wish you a great congress and send you our internationalist greetings, and we thank comrade Alex Dillard for coming to Vénissieux.

Long live the friendship between the PCUSA and the PCF for a world without war and without the exploitation of man by man.

Proletarians of all countries, unite !

Fraternally yours,