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Greek Trotskyists Say: Down With the War on Refugees! Full Citizenship Rights for All Who Have Made It to Greece! We print below a translation of a revised article from a March 2020 supplement of O Bolsevikos, publication of the Trotskyist Group of Greece, section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist). When our comrades first went to press on March 27, the coronavirus pandemic had recently broken out. Thousands of refugees in Greece have been imprisoned in detention camps under horrific conditions. Taking advantage of the situation presented by the COVID-19 outbreak, the New Democracy government passed legislation to requisition land for the construction of more detention centers. The primary responsibility for the plight of the refugees lies with the U.S., the world’s predominant imperialist power. Through economic pillage and wars of depredation in the Near East and beyond, the U.S. imperialists have forced millions to flee their homelands. As the article states, “The majority of refugees detained in Greece’s concentration camps have fled the war zones of Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.” It is crucial for revolutionary Marxists in the U.S., as intransigent opponents of U.S. imperialism, to oppose on principle the European Union (EU). As the article “Fighting Centrist Bending to the European Union” in the English-language edition of the ICL’s theoretical journal Spartacist (No. 66, Spring 2020) explains: “The EU is not a homogenous bloc united against the U.S., even though it functions as a bloc against the U.S. on particular political and economic issues. Its forerunner, the European Economic Community (EEC), was historically a Cold War instrument for the U.S. against the USSR, and the EU continues to act as an adjunct of NATO. The American ruling class uses the EU to maintain Germany within the U.S.’s orbit and to counter Russia. The U.S., Germany and France continue to collaborate in expanding the EU and NATO in tandem in East Europe and the Balkans. At the economic level, a large fraction of the surplus value extracted from the exploitation of workers in Europe is appropriated by American capitalists, directly and indirectly. The U.S. bourgeoisie has benefited politically and economically from the EU and overwhelmingly supports it.” We say: Down with the EU! Down with NATO! All U.S. bases out of Greece! Down with U.S. imperialism! (read on) |
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The International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) is a proletarian, revolutionary and internationalist tendency committed to the task of building Leninist parties as national sections of a democratic-centralist international. Our aim is the achievement of new October Revolutions—nothing else, nothing other, nothing less. The ICL bases itself on Marxist historical, dialectical materialism and seeks in particular to carry forward the international working-class perspectives of Marxism developed in the theory and practice of the Bolshevik leaders V. I. Lenin and L. D. Trotsky and embodied in the decisions of the first four Congresses of the Communist International as well as key documents of the Fourth International such as the Transitional Program (1938) and "War and the Fourth International" (1934). We also look to James P. Cannon, a leader of the early American Communist Party who was won to Trotskyism and went on to become a principal founder of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), working in close collaboration with Leon Trotsky. The origins of the ICL are in the Spartacist League/U.S., which began as the Revolutionary Tendency in the SWP and was bureaucratically expelled in 1963. Our ICL "Declaration of Principles and Some Elements of Program" was modeled on the Declaration of Principles adopted at the 1966 founding conference of the SL/U.S.
Adopted at the Third International Conference of the ICL in early 1998, the declaration presently exists in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese, German, Russian, Polish, Italian, Turkish, Indonesian, Greek, Korean and Tagalog. In this post-Soviet period, marked by a deep regression of proletarian consciousness, we continue to be guided by Trotsky's statement that "the task of the vanguard is above all not to let itself be carried along by the backward flow; it must swim against the current." Reforge the Fourth International, world party of socialist revolution!
