We publish the english translation of the article which was published on A Nova Democracia website about the celebration for the 200 years of Karl Marx.
Chronicle: the Celebration for the 200 years of Karl Marx
“A single word may rejuvenate a country, a single word may bring disaster to country. This is the mental changing the material. Marx is one word which says there must be proletarian revolution and proletarian dictatorship; isn’t this a case of a single word rejuvenating?”
Chairman Mao
Marx, a great word! Internationalism, another great word! They are inseparable: whoever says Marx says internationalism, whoever says internationalism says Marx. The workers of the whole world acknowledging themselves as one single class. The workers of the whole world acting as one single class. This means strength, because divided we are weak, united we are invincible.
Marx, in the Inaugural Address for the International Workingmen’s Association said:
“Past experience has shown how disregard of that bond of brotherhood which ought to exist between the workmen of different countries, and incite them to stand firmly by each other in all their struggles for emancipation, will be chastised by the common discomfiture of their incoherent efforts”.
This is a truth that glimmers. And that, as such, it possesses concreteness, which means, it has bone and flesh.
The celebration that took place in Bremen, Germany, in the last June 30, on the occasion of the bicentenary of Marx, to which I had the privilege of participating, shows the concreteness and the vigor of the doctrine founded by him and secondarily by Engels, and continued by other giants of thought and action. On a mountain range there is always one that was first emerged, as the result of tremendous cataclysms in the core of the planet. Centuries of social cataclysms, of class struggles, of wars and rebellions furnished the working class, and the mountain Karl Marx emerged from the midst of this class.
Karl Marx is neither an old man in flip-flops and pajama, weak, nor a beautiful painting on the wall. He is a 200 years old young man, who enthusiastically announces that the paid slavery – capitalism – will not last forever. More than that: announces that to oppress is unjust, shameful; that to rebel is justified and honorable. Karl Marx, the founder of marxism, teaches us to think and teaches us to act. Marx is a 200 years young man that is at the prime of life, alive and in each one of our heads and hearts. Maybe 200 thousand years from now will still be like this.
I discovered a comrade from Sweden on the celebration that greets the struggle of the Brazilian peasants. A Finnish comrade tells us about the enormous communist tradition in his country. His eyes are of a deep blue, rare among us, but fire sparks flows under his apparent calmness. I recognize a comrade from Rio de Janeiro on the manners of a young female comrade from Hamburg. The way of speaking of a comrade from Turkey brings me to meetings on remote places of Brazil. When a comrade from Chile presents his magnificent rap, young Germans and Austrians enthusiastically sing in Castilian. Outstanding!
I see, side by side, teenagers and veterans that dedicated all their lives to revolution. The delegates, representing the struggle on each country, are not scholars, they do not make complicated and cold explanations about the people in general etc. They are workers, youths of the poorest strata, immigrants or immigrant descendants. Many of them know prisons, are unaffected by this mysticism that reformists preach, that is possible to make revolution the same way you make a ball. Correct, revolution is, in a sense, a ball, because it is a happy event that the oppressed rise. In this ball, however, the pace is dictated by cannons and bayonets.
While joking to the German comrades I say that I learned three word on their language, which is very complicated to us: imperialismus, revisionismus, komunismus. All of us laughed. But, in fact, we have something essential summed up on these three word: combating imperialism and revisionism we will achieve communism. Or not? Communism, in the end, is not something that is built with cheap diplomacy or fake revolutions that only exist on paper. Philosophy emerges from adversity, and also does communism. The difficulties and conflicts are the very matter stirring up to leap into a superior stage. Since its conception until the last breath, the process of life is not made without blood. The “sertanejo” [people from the dry areas of Brazil, from the sertão, mainly in the northeast of the country] Riobaldo had already understood this: to live is something very dangerous. Despite this, one does not get up from the bed every day? No. The same way, dangers must not make us renounce from struggle, because this would be as absurd as renounce living.
We returned to Brazil very grateful for the solidarity and hospitality we received – we were treated by the comrades here with the same solicitude and hospitality with which the peasants receive their visitors – and even more convicted that we follow the correct path, because it is the sole one, illuminated by the star that is our ideology. We returned to a country in which the police daily murders the sons of the people on the favelas, in which the landlords steal lands and unpunishably kill on the countryside. A country razed by colonialism and by imperialism. However, our luggage came heavy with hopes. We bring in them a secret which is known long ago: that nothing of this is eternal. The World Revolution is an unending Stalingrad, in which new and new and new and new and new and new and new generations will rise from within the debris to keep combating. Yes Mr. Bourgeois, tremble: revolution stands and advances to overthrow you. Marx is right.
Proletarians of all countries, unite!
Hamburg, 03/07/2018.
