Seeking to boost sagging morale, the country’s two major communist parties, the CPI and the CPI(M), will host the 11th international meeting of communist and workers’ parties from November 20 to 22 in Delhi.
The decision to host the meeting was taken by the parties when they had a sizeable presence in Parliament. But in the recent general elections, the combined strength of the four Left parties in the Lok Sabha has come down to 25 from its earlier 61 members. According to sources close to the CPI(M) central leadership, this forced them to rethink on hosting the meeting. "We did not anticipate the kind of setback we faced in the elections. So, there was some hesitation on our part whether we should go ahead with this meeting," confided one Left leader. Finally, they decided to stick to their original plan, but with less pomp.
At least 100 delegates from 67 countries representing 81 parties will come to Delhi to take part in the three-day meeting. According to party sources, prominent leaders from Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina, Cuba, China, North Korea, Vietnam, Japan, Germany, France, Portugal, Greece and Russia will attend. The agenda of the conference is ‘The crisis of capitalism and the role of the Communist and Workers Parties for building an alternative’.
After the end of the Soviet Union and the disintegration of the socialist bloc in East Europe, communist parties all over the world suffered a serious setback. The crisis was compounded by the Chinese Communist Party turning inward and taking the capitalist road. But the revival of the Left movement in Latin America gave oxygen to the international communist movement.
The first such meeting of the various communist parties took place in Athens in 1999, almost a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Thereafter the participant countries decided to meet annually. After holding the first seven annual meetings in Greece, the venue shifted to Portugal, then Belarus, and finally last year to Sao Paolo, Brazil. In the initial years, the talks were more on the crisis of the international communist and working class movement. Later, with the series of Left electoral victories in Latin America, ‘US imperialism’ became the central issue.
Finally, the global economic crisis emboldened the communists to focus on the 'Crisis of Capitalism', central theme of this year's conference. Initially, the CPI (M) Kerala unit offered to host the conference. But the party's central leadership did not agree, as the party in the state is beset with serious infighting between chief minister V S Achuthanandan and state party chief P Vijayan, and instead decided to organise the meeting at Delhi. At a time when the Left in both Kerala and West Bengal is facing a major political crisis, the leadership is pinning high hopes on the international conference to restore some of their lost prestige.
