INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF SOLIDARITY WITH PALESTINE

Comrades:
On behalf of the pensioners (P&J) of the planet, organized in the FSM, and on behalf of the Spanish class oriented trade unionism, I would like to express our full solidarity with the rightful demands of the Palestinian people.

I would also like to begin this intervention by committing myself to disseminating the agreements that are being taken here.

Those agreements will be known and then disseminated by both the class oriented PyJ organizations of the five continents, and by the class oriented trade unions of the Spanish state.

As a veteran trade unionist I can affirm that, for decades, during the class trade union struggle, solidarity with the people of Palestine has always been present, both in Spain and in the five continents.

Your just struggle is known and respected not only by all the organized class trade unionism, but also by the non-corrupt rank-and-file trade unionism of class collaboration.

In Spain for example, the majority of the participants in the Workers' Commissions and in the UGT (General Workers' Union) share in your claims, which forces the leaders of these unions to feign their solidarity with your struggle, although after that they collaborate and work together with the Zionists, both in the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) as in the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC).

Therefore today it is possible to organize, all around the globe, solidarity with the Palestinian people, not only with class trade unionism, but also with those trade unionists that collaborate with capitalism.

Anyway, it is important that the possibility of unity of action does not allow the concealment the causes of the inhuman attacks that you suffer.

It is essential to clarify the historical reality of your people.

You suffer attacks that can only be summarized with two words: fascist genocide.

As long as capitalism remains as the economic system that determines the decisions of the majority of the governments of the world, the genocide of the various Israeli governments may continue to enjoy the aid of the bourgeoisie of many countries.

They even had the nerve to award them the Nobel Peace Prize. For capitalists there is no other fatherland but money.

it is riches, and the goal of treasuring them, the only thing that guides their decisions, regardless of the deaths and injustices that they cause.

For this reason the bourgeoisie, led by the owners of the multinationals, takes its decisions in accordance with the possibilities of further increasing its control of the wealth of the planet.

While Israel is capable of helping them earn money, the capitalists will support the Zionists.

The warpath and genocidal Israel allows arms manufacturers to make great benefits.

As they have recently made benefits in the stock markets, a few days after the attacks in Paris.

To use weapons is their goal, in order to reduce their stocks.

It is the arms manufacturers, the oil companies, the power companies and the pharmaceutical companies, multinational companies who, by financing election campaigns, determine the decisions of the bourgeois rulers, regardless of them being conservatives or the social democrats.

All of them abide to the pressures of big capital.

Here is the basis for understanding that your struggle as a people is closely linked with the struggle of all the proletarians, of all wage earners and exploited of the planet, to put an end to capitalism as a system of exploitation of man by man.

Only by ending capitalism will end the possibility that a few are nuclear-weapon States possess of all the wealth.

Today four people are as rich as the combined 50 poorest countries put together; today the one percent of the world's population is richer than the remaining 99 per cent.

These figures demonstrate that capitalism involves only inequality and injustice, which will increase day by day, until we end with it as a system.

We, PyJ, know that the unjust distribution of wealth has only one solution: socialism.

Therefore in our Founding Congress, as UIS of the WFTU, that took place in my city, Barcelona, in February of 2,014 , as well as in the First Conference of PyJ class organizations of America , carried out in Quito (Ecuador) last September, we clearly established that the PyJ of the WFTU have fought all of our whole life, and we will continue to fight for as long as we have any life and force left, next to our class, the working class, in order to put an end to capitalism and to build socialism.

Only governments that are fighting against capitalism, among which I wish to cite Cuba and Venezuela, have clearly demonstrated their solidarity with the Palestinian people.

We welcome these attitudes and will continue to work to ensure that each day there are more governments that denounce the genocide carried out by the Government of Israel.

The veterans of our trade unionists of our UIS of PyJ are very knowledgeable about the reality of your struggle.
During the decades in which we have been active workers and in the recent period that when we are already retired, we have participated in a multitude of actions of solidarity with the people of Palestine.

On the other hand, we the Spanish trade unionists know firsthand suffering as the Palestinian people.
Our people also suffered genocidal methods at the hands of the fascist Franco.

We also suffered from the aid from big capitalists to the genocidal Government of the dictator, aid sometimes public and sometimes concealed, as the aid that Israel receives in its attacks on the people of Palestine.

At the present stage, in the Spanish state, fascism is still showing through the decisions of the fascist dictator's successor. I am referring to the leaders of the Popular Party that is ruling.

As a sample of this neo-fascism in Spain there are two large political realities:

1) The suppression of the right to self-determination (the same right claimed by the Palestinian people) for a variety of nationalities, especially the Catalan and Basque ones.

AND 2) the repeated prison sentences, of up to 3 and 5 years, for trade unionists, for exercising their right to strike or to demonstrate, as well as fines of tens of thousands of euros to trade unions for their actions in the streets against the bosses.

The government of PP in Spain, the same one that has changed the law in order to allow the trade union repression that I just mentioned, has been given continuity to the good relations and to making big economic deals with the Zionist Government of Israel, especially in the topic of the sale of the arms that have served to oppress the Palestinian people.

We, the class oriented trade unions of the Spanish state, denounce these relationships with the Zionists.
The recent developments, both in the region of the Middle East, and in Europe, show that imperialism, which is the basis of the genocide, is still active, and is still powered by the same capitalist leaders that help to oppress Palestine.

For these leaders of the world bourgeoisie war continues to be their preferred method to dominate and despoil the peoples.

This way they provide continuity to the colonization wars of a few centuries ago. They wish to continue appropriating by force the natural resources of the peoples.

You know, among others, about the plundering of the water from the Golan Heights, water that later Israel sells even to Spain.

Other peoples know the plundering of their natural wealth, as is the case of Somalia, Libya, Sahara and Mali in Africa, Afghanistan, Iraq and now Syria, in Asia.

Class trade unionism has always made clear the position that the natural wealth, be it water, minerals, oil, gas, fishing, agriculture and others, belongs only to the their peoples.

The WFTU was born, 70 years ago, already condemning, in its founding congress in Paris in 1,945, the shares of exploitation and plundering of the metropolis against the colonized peoples, and condemning imperialism.

We are going to continue with this same orientation, rejecting the positions of conciliation of classes that have already appeared in the Founding Congress of the WFTU.

The social democratic leadership, which already in 1,945 supported and financed the trade unions in Europe's Nordic countries, pushing them to vote against the resolution condemning colonialism, pushed them after into breaking with the WFTU, and thus the ICFTU was created, the CSI of today, in which there are Israel's trade unions that support the different Zionist governments.

Both in Europe, as in the rest of the planet, class trade unionism struggles to clarify this reality and to unmask false trade unionists, those who claim to defend the working class but who really, in the dark, deal with employers, those who help capitalism to be perpetuate itself, who openly support the imperialist actions and genocides, such as that of Israel in Palestine.

In Spain, this commitment of trade unionism of the CSI with capitalism, is getting to be known, even with sentences of the bourgeois justice system itself confirming this.

it has just become publicly known that many trade union leaders of the CSI (I am referring to the leaders of the Workers' Commissions and UGT) had agreed to betray the workers in exchange for large amounts of money.
The most outrageous case has been that of the leaders of the Workers' Commissions, who were bribed by the company Panrico in order to curb the just demands of the workers, when those same workers were on an indefinite strike for 8 months.

This corrupt practice of trade unionism very well serves the interests of our exploiters, because it's useful to curb the class struggle and to discredit to the trade union organizations, and at the same time they use it to justify their fascists and genocidal actions.

The case of Palestine is a clear example of this.

It is therefore necessary to continue the fight so that unionism is exercised with Marxist honesty and consistency, and this is only possible if trade unionism is class oriented, if unionism is coordinated by the WFTU.

Class trade unions have always used Marxist honesty and consistency as flags to defend the just demands of the workers and of the peoples struggling for independence.

We reaffirm our determination to continue, together with the WFTU, the solidarity in the fight with the people of Palestine.

For this reason, I finish with two "Long live"!

LONG LIVE THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE AND THEIR JUST STRUGGLE!

LONG LIVE THE PROLETARIAN AND INTERNATIONALIST SOLIDARITY!

                                 

Ramallah, 7-12-15.

Quim Boix, Spanish trade unionist.

Secretary General of the UIS (International Union of Trade Unions) of Pensioners and Retirees (PyJ) of the WFTU.