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We congratulate the Workers’ Party of Belgium (PTB) on their successful performance in the 25 May elections, and reproduce their latest statement.
On 25 May, three elections took place in Belgium: for the federal, regional and European parliaments. The main winner turns out to be the Flemish nationalist party N-VA (rightist), obtaining more than 33 percent of the vote in Flanders. But there was also a major advance by the Workers’ Party of Belgium (PTB), which now enters both the federal parliament and the regional parliaments of Wallonia and Brussels.
Raoul Hedebouw, for the province of Liège, and Marco Van Hees, for Hainaut, have been elected to the federal parliament on the PTB-go! list. Raoul Hedebouw, the PTB’s spokesman stated that,
For the first time in 25 years, a new political family, genuinely leftist, and active in Flanders, Wallonia and Brussels, enters the federal and regional parliaments. We are sending two deputies to the federal parliament, two to the regional parliament of Wallonia and four to the Brussels parliament.
In Wallonia, the PTB-go! list received 5.81 percent of the votes (and in the province of Liège, 8.30 percent), making it the fifth political force in the South of Belgium. In Brussels, the list received 3.84 percent, and, thanks to a technical agreement with some small lists, the undemocratic threshold of 5 percent could be surpassed, giving the PTB-go! no less than four seats in the Brussels parliament.
In Flanders, the PTB waged an exemplary election campaign in a very difficult political context, with the dominance of the Flemish nationalist N-VA, the existence of the fascist party VB and the Green party in a comfortable situation of opposition.
In these conditions, and with the 5 percent threshold, unfortunately the PTB was not able to get its chairman, Peter Mertens, elected, although it got an honourable result of 4.52 percent in the province of Antwerp and 8,85 percent in the city of Antwerp, making it the fourth largest party there.
As regards the elections for the European parliament, the PTB-go! received 5,49 percent of the vote, largely insufficient to obtain a seat (Belgium has only 21 seats in the EP, to be divided over the different language groups).
On election evening, Peter Mertens told party militants gathered in Antwerp:
120 years ago, the first Belgian socialist, Edouard Anseele, who hailed from the Flemish city of Ghent, was elected in the Walloon city of Liège. Anseele spoke the language of the working class. Today, Raoul Hedebouw has been elected in Liège as well, and he will also speak the language of the entire working class.
We are a national party that cannot be divided — not by place of birth nor by the language spoken at the kitchen table. For us, what prevails is the social interest of the people, of all people in this country.
During this long election campaign, we have laid the foundations for a strong social current at the grassroots level, and we will absolutely need this in the years to come. Our commitment is to defend the interests of the working class, in all its diversity; of the youth, with all its dynamism; of the voiceless, of those whom this society considers as nothing but numbers; of all people who are going through difficult times.
Raoul Hedebouw, national spokesman of the PTB, echoed these words at the party meeting in Liège:
As member of parliament elected for a national party, I will also be the representative of the workers of Flanders, in Antwerp, Limburg and Ghent. And no, the votes for the PTB are not protest votes, they are votes of hope. Votes for a left that refuses austerity policies, that believes that we, the workers, will further build up self-confidence in order to be able to write the social history of this country.
We warn the traditional parties: if you plan to impose more austerity measures as is the case elsewhere in Europe, you will find yourselves confronted with the PTB deputies, as with the workers who want to stop these policies of budget cuts.
With these election results, and on the basis of an enthusiastic campaign, the PTB commits itself, in the words of its president Peter Mertens, to build, stone upon stone, a social future.
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Thank you very much. This is the third time I was invited here and the second time to celebrate and be with you on this special day of the October Revolution. I am honoured and am very happy.
The first time, I was a bit depressed. But for the third time, the second time of the October Revolution, I’m very happy. Happy for the simple reason that capitalism, imperialism, is in a serious general crisis. [Laughter and applause]
I live in a very small country, a small imperialist country. It’s called Belgium. I do remember, and I was watching, the day the Soviet Union was overthrown and the counter-revolution over the Soviet Union [took place]. The news: chancellor of Germany Helmut Kohl comes with two books. One, in the left hand, the book of Lenin – Imperialism – and in the right hand, Das Kapital, and then he was laughing and he said ‘The day of Karl Marx and Lenin is finished!’
I knew he was attacking me, he was trying to make me depressed, to take some medicine or whatever [Laughter], but I knew that capitalism cannot survive.
But a lot of people believed it. It is very difficult to teach and to explain to young workers – every worker – women and men in the imperialist countries, about the Soviet Union.
I would like to share with you one aspect which was not mentioned: the achievements of the Soviet Union that were realised after the October Revolution, particularly under the leadership of Lenin and specifically comrade Stalin.
Stalin came from a very small, minute, nationality – Georgia. Is it possible for me to be a prime minister of this country? [Chair interjects: I don’t know, after Obama! Laughter]
The Soviet Union had a huge number of different nationalities. The Tsar, Russian imperialism and colonialism had abused and colonised, killed, eliminated, destroyed a lot of colonised nationalities within the Russian empire. But the Soviet Union could build and solve, for the first time in the history of humanity, the equality, the fraternity of all nationalities to live under one home with a new civilisation which is called the Soviet Union. [Applause] It never had been achieved [before].
We know that nationalism is a creation of the bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie looks for the market and it fights for the money. That great home, that great civilisation [the Soviet Union] was not right [to the bourgeoisie]. The enemy is not only the one who is outside standing with a gun. The enemy also plays a lot of ideological enemies, infiltrators.
The Soviet Union, after the Bolshevik revolution, the October Revolution, everybody ganged up on the Soviet Union. Fifteen countries, including the United States, invaded the Soviet Union, destroyed everything that had existed there, and killed 10 million Soviet people, which later on, even, they used that killing and famine as if it was Comrade Stalin that had destroyed Ukraine in 1932.
Lenin says in his marvellous work, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, ‘This happens to an individual: you make in life one step forward, you get drunk and you gamble, lose all your money, you divorce, you think too much, then you take two steps backward in order to come back. It happens to a nation, it does happen also to the class.’
The Soviets were invaded. All modern things were destroyed by the counter-revolution. Lenin says: ‘If there is no industry, there is no proletariat, let us concede.’ And that is Leninism, is Marxism, in the era of imperialism.
The tactic of Lenin, by introducing the New Economic Policy, NEP, was a temporary strategic withdrawal. But some crazy ones who are not really correct communists and Bolshevised in the party, believed that the NEP, the New Economic Policy, was in fact the policy forever.
Once Italian fascism took over in 1923/24, German Nazism was menacing, imperialism was in a crisis already by 1929, Comrade Stalin, he said: ‘If we don’t catch up, the gap between us and them is one hundred years, this beast will destroy us. Collectivisation and industrialisation [are what we need].’
When you just take one work of Lenin and you compare in his work, ‘Shame on America for the plight of the negroes’, in that wonderful work of comrade Lenin, the Afro-Americans today, the ex-slaves in the south, their literacy grade was higher than the Russian peasantry in 1918. When you compare Russia, the Soviet Union, in 1918, there was a 400-year gap between Great Britain and the Soviet Union. Have you ever seen a civilisation who closed the gap in eight years’ time? [Applause]
The Soviet people, they don’t exist anymore. Now they have become Chechens, Georgians, fighting one another one – tribes.
The richest man in Belgium is not a Belgian today; he’s a thief from Kazakhstan. [Laughter] Somalis, who speak one language, have one psychological make-up, one geographical territory, one religion, Islam, and even from Islam, sunni, and from sunni, one line, Maliki – they are now, today, clans and warlords, according to the imperialist media.
My country, Ethiopia, a poor country, or a country with a poor people but rich resources, sent troops when I was a young boy going to school. There was an Ethiopian musician who was singing about Ethiopian soldiers who were being brought in a train to go and fight on the American side in Korea. They died for nothing.
The nationality issues, the equality of people, it can only be solved under the Soviet type of system.
We know that most of our countries are multinational. Today, when you look in Africa, the imperialist media will tell you tribe X against Z, Z against W, W against this, while inciting and creating a proxy war. But one thing: they [the Africans] like a resistance that can shatter the American imperialist dream.
Afghani people resisting the unity of Nato provided the Pakistani people with the correct anti-imperialist leadership against these puppets who are trying to drag 140 million people of Pakistan into a serious problem.
Imperialism is seriously wounded. Comrade Harpal Brar is one of my teachers in one of his eloquent, wonderful works on ‘Capitalism and immigration’ in imperialist countries.
They don’t have children. In the city where I live, 100,000 people live, 30 percent of the population are pensioners. There are no children. In Spain, Italy [the same], by 2040, Russia’s [population] will be 30 percent reduced, Ukraine 40 percent. Not because people don’t won’t to have children, but because it has become impossible for young people to have a job, to have a decent shelter, they have to work flexible hours, they have temporary contracts.
I think that it’s not difficult; I wish I knew Russian to study. They have already now 18 years, the imperialist bourgeoisie, they have all the finest Soviet history, [but] they couldn’t even publish where are the 30 million gulags; they couldn’t produce even a film about it.
They used to inculcate us day and night that there was a famine in Ukraine, a deliberate famine and 10 million Ukrainians dead. There is no [evidence] today [of] that.
Young people in the imperialist countries have to be educated. I am happy for the young one, when she spoke, honest and decent. We, the older ones, we have to have the patience and we have to do all the maximum to win our young generation to realise our defeat and bring, as the Arabs say, for every oppressor class there is a day, and that day is the October Revolution. [Applause]
