The coordination of the International Liaison Committee of Workers and Peoples (ILC), which met September 9-10 in Paris, expresses its satisfaction with the fact that so far 616 worker and anti-imperialist militants from 56 countries have undersigned the call for the 9th Open World Conference (OWC) against war and exploitation which will take place in Algiers next December 8, 9 and 10.

The response that this call has received from militants holding important positions of political or trade union responsibility, and who are directly engaged in the resistance struggles, is also, in its way, an expression of the complexity of the present situation in all countries, but also of the common nature of the
problems that we face.

On all continents the offensive of destruction against workers’ and democratic conquests, of the very dismemberment of nation-States, of the wars underway, and the risks of a world flare-up, as shown by the threats that Trump has made these last weeks against Venezuela and North Korea, have never been so great.

The 9th Open World Conference (OWC) will thus take on a particular contour, because the resistance fights engaged upon on all the continents necessitate, more than ever, discussion in order to draw the first balance sheets, to exchange our experiences, to discuss the ways and means of surmounting the obstacles that we encounter, and to make all these discussions converge in order to help the workers and peoples, without seeking to substitute ourselves for or enter into competition with any party, trade union, association or group whatever: that is the framework that has been fixed by the call for the holding of the 9th OWC.

The coordination of the ILC has reviewed the situation, above the entire offensive against the Venezuelan nation, which is in effect already subject to an economic blockade and is now threatened by a military intervention. The imperialist coalition gathered round Trump and the United States does not want to accept that the Venezuelan people, in voting by more than 8 million for the election of a constituent assembly, may decide their future, defend their sovereignty, their social gains and the redistribution of oil revenues to the people.

Beyond the case of Venezuela, all the countries of Latin America are in the firing line. Above all Brazil, whose putschist Temer, supported by Trump and the financial markets but without any solid social base, lends his support to the policy of aggression against the Venezuelan nation, while he himself seeks to carry out to the bitter end his counter-reform policies to liquidate the Labour Code and old-age pensions, and to generalize privatizations in all domains. The coordination of the ILC hails the resistance of the Brazilian workers’ movement, which has engaged in the struggle for the withdrawal of these murderous plans and for the ousting of Temer.

These offensives are underway everywhere, in the name of ”lowering the cost of labor”, and seek to wipe out the conquests gained by decades of class struggle. The most recent of these offensives is the attempt by the French government to smash the Labor Code, in the framework of the same orientations impelled by the European Union, be that in Germany, in Great Britain, or within the Spanish State, in Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria… and whose consequences are dramatic.

In Africa, the shock wave created by the imperialist aggression in Libya has not ceased to spread, and is at present affecting and threatening the whole of sub- Saharan Africa, whose States are threatened by pure and simple disintegration, while the imperialist interventions have no other aim than to ensure the pillage of wealthy resources by multiplying the number of military bases abroad. The IMF is seeking to subject the peoples to new adjustment plans, condemning them to policies whose consequences are barbaric. The resistance of the youth, of the working class and the populations expresses itself through strikes and demonstrations.

In the Middle East, the heroic resistance of the Palestinian people has not waned, despite all the obstacles, the ferocious repression and the generalized chaos of the whole region, especially in Syria, Iraq and Yemen, as a product of the plans of American imperialism.

We believe that the 9th OWC of the ILC can be a determining point of support in helping workers and peoples who reject and fight these reactionary policies and are mobilizing against them.

And this all the more because everywhere peoples are confronted with brutal attacks and a throwing into question of their rights and gains (in particular by a general precarization of society and a direct or insidious throwing into question of the right to strike), attacks which are often carried out with the consent of those who are supposed to represent their interests.

The problems and the difficulties that this resistance poses express themselves within the very workers’ and democratic organizations themselves, sometimes going so far as to provoke crises, collapse, or the disintegration of organizations and parties in which the workers and peoples had traditionally placed their confidence.

In the absence of organized points of support, such situations can, despite major mobilizations, lead to the worst kind of divisive adventures or other “solutions” of unhappy memory, clearing the way for corporatism, communitarianism, racism… as the horrible images of massacres and the millions of so-called “migrants” thrown into the sea have already testified to.

We are convinced that the independence of the workers’ movement with respect to the bosses, the States, the international institutions, and that its action and its organization on its own terms, are the key to the solution for the workers, peoples and nations.

It is in this framework that we make you the proposal to discuss, at the 9th OWC, ways and means of organizing the defense and the reconquest of the rights of working men and women and the youth, codified in labor laws; of the rights to healthcare threatened with destruction; of the fight against privatizations; the defense of democratic freedoms; the defense of the sovereignty of peoples and nations and the right to self-determination.

How, over and above any legitimate differences or divergences, the particular approaches, the conditions peculiar to each of us, the lived experiences, the regroupings already under way, how is it possible to gather, to unite in order to resist, to construct or reconstruct? Without anyone claiming to be the holder of the solutions or the eternal truths that it would suffice simply to implement, thus giving each and everyone complete freedom to express themselves as they wish.

And that all the more so given that, around the world, all the governments are extremely fragilized, as testified by the number of elections in which voter abstention or a refusal to vote have dominated. And as in other cases where the vote has been used to clearly sanction the governments and their parties.

We call on you to constitute, to strengthen, the delegations of each country to the 9th OWC against war and exploitation. There we will implement the historic motto: “The emancipation of the workers will be carried out by the workers themselves.”