Dear Comrades!
Today, on May Day, we extend out fraternal greetings to the Maoist Internationalist Movement, the true heirs of the glorious struggles of the American proletariat, to whose noble exploits more than a century ago we owe the great tradition of celebrating International Workers' Solidarity Day.
On this May Day, 1999, proletarian internationalism is the lithmus test of being Communist, both for individuals and organizations, all over the world and in Russia in particular. This concerns first and foremost one's attitude towards the situation around Yugoslavia. The demand for NATO to stop its bombings of Yugoslavia is, for a Communist, inseparable from the demand for Serbian troops to pull out of Kosovo, from the demand for self-determination for the Kosovo people. Now that, in a militarist frenzy, one can hear demands in Russia for declaring war on NATO and for a state union with Yugoslavia, your principled position and your support for us here would be of particular importance. The 'anti-Western' and 'pro-Serbian' hysteria in today's Russia is another testimony of the fact that the country is plunging headlong into the abyss of social-imperialism, even uglier in some of its aspects than U. $. imperialism. Having scrapped the quasi-Communist rhethoric of the late USSR, post-Soviet Russia preserves and is strengthening its imperialist interests in those countries where it can still compete with Amerikan imperialism. In so far as the military and economic resources of capitalist Russia has long been far inferior to those of the U$A and Western Europe, the imperialist ambitions of its bourgeoisie are accompanied by growing exploitation of the Russian proletariat and the people in general. Besides mythical 'pan-Slavic' or 'anti-Western' unity, Russia can give nothing to those countries where it tries to claim overlordship.
There currently existing no powerful proletarian state able to effectively oppose imperialism, the internationalist solidarity of all Communist and Leftist forces worldwide against attempts both by the imperialists of the 'developed' countries and by 'local' bourgeois elites to unleash a new world war becomes particularly important. In the words of Chairperson Mao (translating from the Russian), 'The way of struggle against an unjust war is the following: before the war has blazed forth, one must do everything to prevent it, but when it HAS blazed forth, one should use every opportunity to struggle with war against war, i. e. oppose a just war to an unjust one.'
LONG LIVE THE INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY OF THE PROLETARIAT AND OPPRESSED NATIONS OF THE WORLD!
NATO, GET OUT OF SERBIA! YUGOSLAVIAN ARMY, GET OUT OF KOSOVO!
With proletarian greetings,
Dar ZHUTAYEV,
Denis SELIVERSTOV,
Obninsk Branch of VLKSM/RKSM(b)
Contact MIM by writing mim@mim.org