CPUSA Co-Chair Rossana Cambron presented the following remarks at the 22nd International Meeting of Communist and Workers’ Parties in Cuba, October 2022.

Dear comrades,

Thank you to the Communist Party of Cuba for hosting this meeting and continually inspiring us that the impossible is possible.

It is clear that U.S. imperialism is the most violent threat facing the international working class today and a core contradiction that our movement must confront.

You cannot fight against capitalism unless you also fight against 21st-century imperialism.

The United States military is actively intervening on every populated continent. Neo-colonial European militaries are involved in Africa and the Middle East to extract resources, with zero regard for the peoples of those countries and zero concern about the environmental destruction that they are causing. The Palestinian and Yemeni people continue to suffer human rights abuses by U.S. client states. NATO, the greatest threat to world peace, is on the march eastward, creeping closer to the Russian border and threatening to expand across the globe to the Pacific. The war in Ukraine threatens the world with a nuclear holocaust.

As terrifying as the situation might seem, there is hope. We must remember what Lenin wrote: “Imperialism is the eve of the social revolution of the proletariat.” This is an opportunity for the international proletariat.

All around the world the working class is waking up to the injustices they face under capitalism, and class consciousness is spreading. Like in many other countries, the Communist Party USA is seeing growth at unprecedented rates. Young people look around them and see a world in which the environment is being destroyed, warfare and violence are on the rise, they are unable to afford education or healthcare, and their prospects for the future look bleak.

As a result, in our country we are witnessing a youth-led surge of new labor militancy. With millions of young workers actively organizing their workplaces, we see that change is coming, and this will also strengthen the anti-imperialist movement.

In the United States, these interlocking crises have combined to create a new political moment, one filled with both great danger and opportunity. This danger is revealed by the growth of a neo-fascist mass movement led by ex-president Trump that attempted to retain power by illegal unconstitutional means, including inciting an insurrection on January 6th. But broad, all-people’s anti-fascist democracy so far has proven more resilient and, driven by its own mass movement, elected a new governing coalition that is attempting to implement basic reforms in domestic economic and social policy.

But this process too is extremely contradictory, particularly with respect to foreign policy. Here it appears that U.S. imperialism, at least so far, retains its old features as it pursues a new Cold War against China and other countries ruled by communist and left parties, along with retaining its hostility toward Russia.

On the other end, we are seeing a slow-moving coup that continues to travel across our country and whose main goal is to suppress the vote in any way possible.

Within the USA our party continues its fight to meet the needs of our working class and people. We remain committed to building a broad front against the growing fascist danger. The coming midterm elections will help determine what direction our country goes in. We continue to struggle against war and imperialist aggression. But we need a far larger and more effective anti-imperialist movement in this country, encompassing all fields of political activity.

We are hopeful because our upcoming mid-term election season is taking place within the context of an uptick in class struggle. We have reports of an increase in early voters over previous midterm election cycles, the majority of whom tend to be progressive.

A shift in public debate was caused by the hearings and the recent Supreme Court decision that strips away the rights of women to choose what is best for their own bodies.

In state after state, women and men, but mostly women in huge numbers, started registering to vote.

Given the importance of internationalism and anti-imperialism, our International Department and Peace and Solidarity Commission recently hosted a conference on internationalism and anti-imperialism, the first of its kind in our Party’s 103-year history. The two-day, hybrid, in-person and online event was attended by thousands of people, with participation from comrades from dozens of countries, making it the most attended event in our Party’s recent history.

The reason for the conference’s success was that the messages of internationalism and anti-imperialism resonate with the working class!

So how do we confront imperialism? For us the answer is a revitalized, broadly based, powerful peace movement. Such a movement, encompassing wide sections of the populations, will be objectively anti-imperialist.

We see that an effort to defeat imperialism is to build a strong peace movement in our country, one that will connect with peace movements around the world.

Once able to scare the ruling class into thinking twice about using military force overseas, the peace movement in the U.S. has faltered and weakened. The current peace movement is fractured and lacks the guiding principles of anti-imperialism and internationalism. We commit to work to change this and build a massive, international peace front.

This potential peace front consists of overwhelming world public opinion which is utterly against war and for peaceful solutions, along with organized peace and social justice movements working directly to accomplish these aims. It includes the existing socialist countries and developing countries that maintain some degree of independent policies. It includes all the Communist and workers’ parties represented here today. When we work together, when we foster the might of the international working class, we are unstoppable.

The proposed declaration of this, the 22nd Meeting of the Communist and Workers Parties, is an important step in the direction of gathering our parties together to fight for these shared goals.

As the Communist Party in the United States, we strongly and wholeheartedly demand that the U.S. government end its illegal blockage of Cuba and its illegal efforts to topple the revolutionary government of China. We stand in solidarity with our hosts, the Communist Party of Cuba and all the people of Cuba against U.S. imperialism.

We demand and will work towards the complete abolition of NATO and the closure of all United States military bases around the world and work towards a peaceful world order.

We will continue to build our Party and the popular front in the United States to defeat the growing fascist threat.

We will work to preserve our precious environment against the assault of capitalism and the bourgeoisie regime. We will work for nuclear disarmament.

CPUSA stands ready to work with all our fraternal comrades on all these shared goals.

We resolutely stand against the Biden administration’s Cold War 2.0 policies.

We resolutely stand against imperialist threats against China and all other countries and recognize American imperialism is the greatest threat to world peace.

In unity with the communist and workers we resolve to fight for democracy, for freedom, for socialism and for a better future for all of us!

Images: International Peace Day Ceremony, United Nations Photo, cropped (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0); Cuba solidarity rally, CPUSA.

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