Crowds of people participated in the main events of the 46th Festival of the Communist Youth of Greece (KNE), held in Athens on September 17, 18 and 19, 2020, in strict compliance with all necessary measures for safety and health protection.

It was a great Festival, different but also familiar at the same time, which made a loud call for the daily struggle for the rights to education, work, health, and life. It was a breath of hope and optimism!

This year, many Communist and anti-imperialist youth organizations, which could not attend the festival due to the pandemic, sent their video messages.

As the GS of the CC of the KKE, Dimitris Koutsoumbas, stressed in his speech: “This year’s festival is not special only because it is conducted observing the necessary measures of protection. Besides, the conscious discipline of the members and friends of KNE to the observance of the measures of public health protection is recognized even by our opponents. They are bothered because they know that this discipline contains the indiscipline towards the unfair exploitative system.

This year's Festival is special because it consists a message in the gloomy situation that our people are facing. The slogan "Socialism, for us to breathe freely, for life to be victorious" may have originated with the last cry of George Floyd, who was suffocating below the knee of the US policeman, but eventually these cries multiply all over the world and also in our country.

It is a cry of poverty, insecurity, refugees, unemployment, unpaid work, injustice, racism, and the exploitation of the many by a handful of parasites swimming in money.

It is a cry that can find a way out only in one way: By class struggle, its strengthening, the participation of more and more people, especially the new shift of the working class, in the organized struggle, with a clear and firm goal: To put obstacles to the worst that follow, struggling for life to be victorious, for the working class to be victorious by conquering its own power and constructing the new, socialist society. This year's Festival is special because it goes against the flow. Because it jolts people’s conscience that is daily bombarded with various perceptions such as "nothing changes" or the poisonous "there is no room for struggle, we must have national unity".

Regarding the evolution of the pandemic, the GS of the CC of the KKE noted that “the public health systems, even the ones in the metropolises of capitalism, are being tried out and collapse, dragging hundreds of thousands of lives down with them. The capitalist crisis was manifested sooner than expected. Day by day, its burden is put on the shoulders of the  workers and the poor popular strata, who also paid for the previous crisis. It is the new chance for the big capital to get over with any obstacle to its profitability, that is, any labor right left.

On the ground of the new capitalist crisis the dangerous developments between imperialist centres and bourgeois classes of each country are sharpened. This is manifested by every chance, even in the case of the vaccine.

It is not accidental that we hear more and more about the “diplomacy of the vaccine”, eventually showing the criterion behind these games, which is to gain advantage in terms of competition and safeguard the biggest profitability of the companies.

A part of this puzzle of competitions are the very dangerous developments for the Greek people and the peoples of the region, from the Balkans to North Africa, from the Aegean to Middle East.

The above factors, despite their relative independence, are not independent of each other, nor did they coincide, as the government and the other bourgeois parties claim, talking about a triple crisis (“economic”, “health care”, and “national” crisis), as if this triple crisis fell from the sky or was sad fate.

This analysis conceals the class and deeper essence of facts. It conceals that all these factors feed off each other, and the one is the continuation of the other…

In fact, they are manifestations of the same policy. At the core of this policy lies the safeguarding of the profitability of the capital at all levels, sacrificing the popular needs.

Eventually, these are the impasses, the barbarity and the decay of the capitalist system itself, to be paid by the peoples even with their own blood in case of military conflicts.

In this sense, the slogan “Capitalism is the virus”, that was put forward on the occasion of the pandemic, is truly successful.

Dimitris Koutsoumbas commented in detail the relations between Turkey and Greece, the evolution of the pandemic and the capitalist crisis in Greece, the aims of struggle of the workers’ - people’s movement and added: “ It is no exaggeration today, on the 21^st century, to have stable employment with a good salary and rights, to enjoy a high level of health care, education, culture, sports, to live in a humane environment. We can have all these! This is the plan of the KKE. A plan for today and tomorrow, which, by its overthrowing Programme, lights the way for a different organization of society and economy, with the people being in power and the owner of the wealth they produce. This is the new society, the one we not only envision but also struggle for on a daily basis so that we can bring it closer as soon as possible.

Socialism, for life to be victorious!”