The Central Committee of the KKE held an event on 6 April 2026 under the slogan “No sacrifices for their profits and wars”.
The event was attended by a large crowd, including many who have joined the KKE in recent times through our people’s struggles against imperialist war, the country’s involvement in it, and the daily struggle to ensure that the people do not bear the burden and consequences of their wars. These are people who, alongside the communists, have fought in every workplace and sector to make their voices heard loud and clear: “Greece out of the war – we will not pay the price”. They stand shoulder to shoulder with communists in every trade union and mass organization of the labour and popular movement, organizing the struggle to defend the rights and interests of our people —not those of the exploiters, who today present them as “national interests”.
Dimitris Koutsoumbas, GS of the CC of the KKE, presented the KKE’s positions and delivered sharp criticism of the New Democracy government’s foreign and domestic policy, which it pursues with the support of other political forces despite their hollow opposition rhetoric.
Speakers at the event included various figures across social life who have joined forces with the KKE. Messages of greeting were also read from the Tudeh Party (Iran), the Communist Party of Israel, and the Communist Party of Turkey.
Below we publish an excerpt from D. Koutsoumbas’s speech on international developments:
“The contradictory statements we hear daily about the course of the war do not primarily reflect the unstable and erratic nature of US President Trump, nor the ‘lack of a plan’, as various mainstream commentators suggest. Rather, they reveal the significant difficulties faced by the US, Israel, and their allies, who have failed to achieve even one of their stated objectives.
The course of this war also shows that they are not invincible or all-powerful, as they would have us believe in order to instil fear and paralysis among the people.
After all, imperialist war is not a display of the imperialists’ strength, but above all a sign of their weakness and impasses. It is a condition that weakens them. Under certain circumstances, it may even create instability in their rule. It opens the way for the people to step forward, test their strength, and assert their rights.
To the question many people ask —‘What can we do in the face of all this?’— and what is required to ‘build a strong anti-war movement today’, we reply that a fundamental prerequisite is a widespread understanding that the very source of war lies in the system of capitalist exploitation itself.
‘War is the continuation of politics by other means’, as Clausewitz famously said. Consequently, no supposed ‘return to politics and diplomacy’, nor appeals ‘to international law as a means of resolving disputes’ —as advocated even by those speaking in the name of an anti-war pacifist movement— can spare us from imperialist wars.
This is because war is not a deviation from capitalist ‘normality’, but a mode of existence of this exploitative system. It is an extension, at the international level, of capitalist exploitation in the workplace and of competition among monopoly business groups. For this reason, anti-war criticism and action cannot be confined to whether international law is being observed —a law shaped under entirely different conditions and long since reduced to a scrap of paper by the imperialists, well before Trump.
After all, imperialist war is unjust and directed against the peoples, even when waged under the guise of an international coalition or following a UN Security Council resolution, as has happened in the past.
A strong anti-war, anti-imperialist movement means confronting all imperialist centres and alliances —and above all those in which each country’s ruling class participates.
Making use of the contradictions among them in the interests of the working class requires, first and foremost, clarity about the strategic objective: the overthrow of capitalist barbarity in our country. It also requires an understanding of why these contradictions arise, so that the movement does not become a mere follower, aligning first with one side and then with another.
In this sense, political forces and parties that foster the illusion of a supposed ‘pro-peace role’ for the bases and NATO do nothing to advance this cause.
Nor do those parties serve the interests of the Greek people, which criticize the EU by claiming it is supposedly ‘asleep’ or ‘absent’, or, conversely, portray it as a serious counterweight to US aggression —at a time when the US is heavily arming , transforming its economy into a war economy, fuelling an unjust war that has been raging for four years in Ukraine, and bolstering its military presence in the Red Sea or the Horn of Africa.
The contradictions currently emerging between the US and the EU certainly have nothing to do with any pro-peace policy on the part of the latter or its governments. They stem from the specific interests of European monopolies, which are being squeezed in the context of US–China competition.
The same applies to those who attribute a supposedly anti-fascist or anti-imperialist role to Putin’s Russia —a role that emerged from the overthrow of socialism and the dismantling of the achievements of the Soviet people— or who look to today’s China of billionaires, which claims supremacy in international capitalism.
The power to turn things upside down lies with the working class itself, with the people. Only glimpses of this immense power have been seen recently: in the mass anti-war rallies in Greece, the US, and Britain; in rallies expressing solidarity with the peoples of Palestine and Cuba; and in more advanced forms of struggle, such as the stand taken the seamen, who threw back in the faces of the shipowners the ‘death warrants’ they were given to sign so they could be sent into the lion’s den. It can also be seen in the coordinated strike by dockworkers in 20 Mediterranean ports under the slogan ‘We won’t work for their war’; in the courageous stance of our conscripts raising their voices both within the military camps and at public demonstrations against the country’s participation in the war; and in the student protests that have forces the cancellation of NATO war seminars at their universities. We must continue in this direction, so that today’s spark becomes a fire.
That is where we will devote all our strength, under the slogan: ‘No sacrifices for their war or their profits’.
It is telling that recent opinion polls show strong opposition among our people to the deployment of Greek armed forces abroad, on Euro-Atlantic missions that put the country at risk, as well as deep concern that US military bases in Greece could become targets of attack and retaliation.
A dynamic section of the working class and our people is now clearly emerging, one that views positively our Party’s actions and stance against imperialist war, and opposes our country’s military involvement. This demonstrates that resistance exists to the government’s policies, to war-mongering and nationalist frenzy, and to war propaganda.”
