In November, 1997, a number of political parties in the world signed on to the following statement: "Financial oligarchy, transnational companies, whose assault troops are American imperialism and international Zionism, under the banners of deceit and 'World Democracy' exert increasing pressure in order to install a world order." Principally the work of the Russian Communist Workers Party and the Workers Party of Belgium, the document nonetheless garnered the signatures of those who should have known better, especially the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), which was the party conducting People's War that we could have expected better from and thus bears a heavy responsibility for the outcome of the conference that produced this document.
Meanwhile, the Communist Party of the Philippines and some others signing the November, 1997 "Declaration of the Leningrad Conference" refused to sign the MIM-initiated petition to celebrate the birthday of W.E.B. Du Bois in 2001 and fully account for imperialist parasitism. The willingness to equate "international Zionism" with Amerikan imperialism is anti-Semitism and a coup by fascist forces seeking to derail our movement with a wildly distorted understanding of parasitism. We are not surprised that Russian nationalists and European social-democrats seeking to whitewash their own imperialist ruling classes as they have so many times before signed on to the document, but unfortunately it was not only those signing. They received important internationalist legitimacy from the CPP and others.
To be sure, Israeli imperialism is an enemy of the international proletariat and constitutes a bulwark of parasitism in itself, but no one with any sense of reality equates it with Amerikan imperialism in power or places it above the power of various European imperialist countries. While numerous European parties signed on to the resolution, there is no specific mention of those imperialists and yet the reference to Zionism is broadened to be "international Zionism" in order to equate it with Jews in a palatable form. It is crystal clear that the target of the document is not Israeli imperialism but the Jews as a group. Thus, European social-democracy and its many signatories on the November, 1997 statement once again prepares the ground for a partial grasp of the question of parasitism and the road to fascism.
Jews in Russia did manage to emigrate some portion of the time in the Brezhnev era of the social-imperialist USSR and thus offered something of a breach in struggle against U.$. imperialism in the minds of many Brezhnev-influenced workers. Without denying this specific fact, it is far from being the case that this fact deserved to be elevated to an understanding of parasitism and a geopolitical statement. Parasitism is a question squarely in front of all those seeking to unite oppressed nations and defeat U.$. imperialism and in this matter it is important to realize that not just Jews but most Western European peoples and their North Amerikan descendants have gained access to special privileges under imperialism.
MIM has struggled relatively quietly to remove the influence of Nazism in our movement for some years now, especially on the question of imperialism and the labor aristocracy. Yet, replacing the words "American imperialism" with "British imperialism," Hitler could have written part of the "Declaration of the Leningrad Conference" in 1997. Seeking to deflect attention from imperialist parasitism, Hitler used the Jews as a lightning-rod to save imperialism in Germany. As Stalin said in 1931, anti-Semitism is a vestige of cannibalism; yet, today, it appears that even many calling themselves communist cannot seem to grasp the lesson of the danger of anti-Semitism to the international proletariat. Furthermore, while MIM recognizes this sort of anti-Semitism as a huge danger in itself, it is only a fraction of the problems presented to the international proletariat by a failure to understand imperialist parasitism in general. It will not be possible to defeat social-democracy or its alternative of fascism in the imperialist countries without Marxist-Leninist-Maoist understanding of imperialist parasitism. We call on the CPP and all other honest forces to repudiate the "Declaration of the Leningrad Conference" of November, 1997 and sign up on MIM's W.E.B. Du Bois declaration for his upcoming birthday celebration of 2002.
Contact MIM by writing mim@mim.org