Amid the ongoing global economic and environmental crisis, socialism remains the only real alternative for the future of mankind.
This is the conclusion of representatives from 85 communist, labour and workers’ parties of more than 60 countries who attended the recent 11th International Meeting of Communist and Workers’ Parties in New Delhi, India. They included delegations from the USA, Canada and the UK. Navin Chandarpal represented the People’s Progressive Party of Guyana.

The delegates noted in an adopted statement that “the current crisis, probably the most acute and all encompassing since the Great Depression of 1929, has left no field untouched. Hundreds of thousands of factories are closed. Agrarian and rural economies are under distress intensifying misery and poverty of millions of cultivators and farm workers globally. Millions of people are left jobless and homeless. Unemployment is growing to unprecedented levels and is officially expected to breach the 50 million mark. Inequalities are increasing across the globe — the rich are getting richer and the poor, poorer. More than one billion people, that is one-sixth of humanity, go hungry.”

They stressed that “the current global recession is a systemic crisis of capitalism,” not an “aberration based on the greed of a few or lack of effective regulatory mechanisms. Profit maximisation, the raison d’ etre of capitalism, has sharply widened economic inequalities both between countries and within countries in these decades of `globalisation’. The natural consequence was a decline in the purchasing power of the vast majority of world population.”

“This once again vindicates the Marxist analysis that the capitalist system is inherently crisis ridden,” the delegates agreed.

They pledged to struggle for an alternative to the capitalist system.

“Our struggle for an alternative is for a system where there is no exploitation of people by people and nation by nation. It is a struggle for another world, a just world, a socialist world,” the delegates explained in their statement.

The Communist Party of India-Marxist and the Communist Party of India jointly hosted the 11th International Meeting of Communist and Workers’ Parties.
Hemraj Muniram