The Circolo Lenin and the editorial staff of the "Scintilla" magazine greet the representatives of the communist parties and organizations present at this international seminar and thank the comrades of the WPB for having invited us to this important congress of communists, which treats a question concerning the very organization of the dictatorship of the capital on the popular masses and which has become an unifying theme of the mobilization of the communists, to a national and international level, in order to lay the foundations of the building of an alternative society to the capitalist one.

The inclination of capital to flow over the national borders is not something new, it rather aggravates a tendency that Marx had already described in a scientific way in The German Ideology and in The Manifesto.

The bourgeois parliamentary democracy is today the best packaging of the imperialist content of capitalism. In Italy, at the eve of parliamentary elections, the employers organization Confindustria determines the program of the bourgeois political coalitions centre-left and centre-right.

In a significant way, it is the people of centre-left who assure the employers of their absolute and indisputable fidelity to their program. The cuts in the pensions and salaries, the flexibility and the freedom to dismiss workers, as wanted by the employers in the name of the requirements of the "global market", become automatically the political program of the centre-left and the centre-right.

Behind the fake pluralism and the apparent dialectics between the bourgeois political forces is hidden a complete submission to the class interests of the capitalists: in the capitalist countries, the traditional political coalitions represent just formal varieties of the bourgeois dictatorship.

They don't differ; at most, they distinguish each other by being subjugated to different struggling fractions of the capital.

After the end of the time of the social state, created to contain the struggles of the popular masses, the capital today, pushed by the crisis in its profits, leads a thorough offensive against the living standard of the lower classes.

In the first months of this year, the economy of the US, presented as a model in the capitalist countries, was struck by inflation and stagnation and the commercial deficit has reached an unprecedented level; at the same time, from Italy to Turkey, the stock markets have collapsed. Yahoo, the giant of the new economy, must resort to massive dismissals, as a consequence of the collapse of its shares.

The origin of the crisis lays in the intrinsic limit of the capitalist system: the difficulty of making the capital more productive grows with the increase of the capital. The more the mass of capital grows, the more grows the difficulty to develop it more with the necessary profit rates.

The convulsions, which affect violently the capitalist system, are the consequence of its attempt to answer the crisis by making the economy more and more dependent on finance.

The forces of capital seemed to have found the magic solution to their problems: money seemed to create money. But the faith of the capitalists in an easy and quick return of financial assets and investments in the technological sector in comparison to the productive cycles has early vanished.

The financial drugs and the delusions in the new economy that capitalism tried to use in order to hold back the effects of its crisis were only able to underline its weakness: it was a false solution to the problems of capitalism which opened new and deeper contradictions in the world of capital; to use a expression by Marx, the bourgeois society is like a magician who is not able anymore to dominate the infernal powers that he has evoked.

Money doesn't grow by itself but by the exploitation of salaried work; financial speculation and the new economy, falsely presented as independent of the real production, are also bound to this limitation; the capital can intensify to the maximum the exploitation but can not go round it, nor replace it.

The level of the contradictions of the capitalist system is high enough to take away, at the same time as the new economy and the stock markets, the growing economies of the 80s, with Japan and South Korea at the top, and even whole continents like Latin America.

Capital, in its globalised form, tends to go over the national barriers and prejudices, by destroying all the barriers to the expansion of the exploitation of peoples and of nature and by plundering the weakest economies.

In Asia and Latin America, international capitalism has decentralized entire production chains and encouraged the nations of these continents into debt contracting policies in order to subject them better to its interests. Behind the apparent development of these economies, one could find a combination of foreign and local capital that was formed under the sign of the debt incurring policy promoted by the developed capitalist countries: a kind of Marshall Plan, created to help capitalism find new forms of outlets, indispensable to take away from the masses of Asia and Latin America the surplus sufficient to feed the globalised capital. The countries of Asia and Latin America have in common a reduced work force cost, seducing fiscal policies, an iron social stability, an absolute labour discipline, a lack of the most elementary safety norms for the environment and at the workplace.

The same situation exists in the east European countries: for example, 9,700 Italian companies have settled down in Romania, pushed by a wild exploitation of a low-cost workforce; a new colonialism based on the brutal extraction of surplus from the working class has replaced the old colonialism, made up by battleships and military occupations.

Capitalism itself creates and destroys these situations. After having promoted them, it leaves them when they are not useful anymore. The extreme poverty of a large part of the population of these continents has a big effect on the internal demand and can have devastating effects on the Western economies by provoking a collapse of the exportations.

As a result, these economies are not able anymore to pay their debts to the western banks, and one can see the quick collapse of these economies which were build in an artificial way, with closure of factories, massive dismissals and a worsening of the subjugation of the economy to the international capitalism, which in Latin America causes the dollarisation of the economy.

The fact that the currency of the strongest imperialist country is imposed to Latin America represents in a characteristic way the topicality of the thoughts of Lenin about imperialism. Lenin taught us that the inequalities in development as well as the state of famine of the masses are essential and preliminary conditions to this production system. As long as capitalism will

stay as it is, the surplus of capital will not be used to improve the living standards of the respective country, because that would cause a fall of the profits of the capitalists, but to increase these profits by exporting abroad, in the less developed countries.

The most classical measure to which capitalism resorts in time of crisis is the increase of the surplus rate, that it is to say the exploitation of the working class. The modern capitalism knows that it can only resort to its old remedy: to put the burden of the crisis on the shoulders of the masses of the countries dominated by imperialism, of the countries which try to find a way out from misery and under-development, of the proletariat of the metropoles.

The images of Daewoo workers fighting with the police show how tragic is their situation and how barbarous is capitalism, which after having deceived them, throw them away and let them in poverty.

However, a new class-consciousness is growing: the course of the events is such that the proletariat of these countries learnt at its own expenses what capitalism means.

The axis of class struggle is moving from each single company, from each single country to a world scale. The current crisis gives to the communists a theoretical victory and a plan of highly important and urgent theoretical, political and organizational tasks.

Capitalism did accomplish its historical mission: to unify the world, or, better said, to create a world market which unifies the world, but through a mechanism, the capitalist competition, which is at the origin of dramatic divisions.

The aggressivity of the capital forces pushes into the struggle more and more important masses; it must lead the working class and the exploited masses of the western world, and the communists, to realize their task of joining their forces to these of the international class struggle.

It is fundamental to consolidate the relations between our organizations because in the global market there can not be a victorious outcome of the struggles if they don't acquire this international character proper to the communist organizations.

Internationalism is a necessity to reverse, in favour of the lower classes, the internationalisation of the markets.

Globalisation tends more and more to reinforce the formation on a world scale of the social class which is able to solve the capitalist contradictions, by destroying the market and by establishing the communist organization of the society.

Globalisation makes closer the social revolution and the liberation of exploited peoples, in spite of the opposed will of the world capital.

The task of the communists is to free the international proletariat of the prejudice that the capitalist system is the only one possible, that it represents the end of the history of humanity.

To defend us all together against the offensive of the capital forces, to react to the disastrous course of the policies of the national bourgeoisies, to launch the assault against a system, which, to reproduce itself, has to impoverish a more and more important part of the humanity, it is fundamental to reinforce the international cooperation between the communists to take the lead of the struggles of the exploited masses and definitively overthrow the capitalist and imperialist barbarism.