The Christian Rakovsky International Socialist Center and the RedMed web network, in cooperation with the Revolutionary Workers' Party (DIP) in Turkey and its sister party in Greece, the Workers' Revolutionary Party (EEK), are organizing a conference against the NATO Summit to be held in Ankara on July 7-8, 2026, bringing together participants from more than 20 countries. Following the online conference, on July 5, participants from Greece, Russia, and Palestine will address the working class at an event to be organized by the Revolutionary Workers' Party in Gebze, an industrial hub near Istanbul, and talk about the importance of the struggle against NATO for the future of the working class.
It is well known that the meeting to be held in Ankara by the murderous organization known as NATO, just as was the case with the Madrid Summit of 2022, will be of great significance both for the immediate steps that the organization will take in the coming period and for its longer-term future. According to NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, the purpose of NATO's meeting in Ankara is to take action to transform the alliance's commitments into concrete results. He identifies three main agenda items for the Ankara meeting: increasing military investments, expanding the arms industry, and intensifying imperialist support for Ukraine.
Even this agenda alone demonstrates that the purpose of the summit is to transfer resources to the military build-up by further tightening the noose around the necks of workers and laboring masses whose living conditions have steadily deteriorated as a result of the crisis, so that in the future NATO may more easily slaughter not only the peoples of Russia and China, but also the peoples of those countries that may pose a danger to imperialism or threaten it through revolutionary upheavals. These funds will not be spent on investments that could provide billions of people with better education and healthcare, better food and a more prosperous life. They will instead be spent on the development of weapons designed to destroy humanity. They will be used in Ukraine, where Nazi brigades serve as the frontier garrison of imperialism, in order to force Russia to its knees on behalf of NATO.
At the same time, the United States in particular is preparing to assign new roles to Poland in the Baltic Sea region, to Romania in the Black Sea region, and to Turkey, through new deployments both in the Bosporus and in Adana, in order to prepare NATO for a whole series of wars that imperialism intends to wage in the future. NATO is preparing to assume new missions outside the Atlantic region, including in West Asia and the Caucasus.
It is equally clear that the Anti-NATO Conference, which brings together a range of parties, organizations, and individuals committed to abolishing this murderous organization, must itself develop approaches that are at least as concrete. At a time when the aggression of imperialism, from Venezuela to Iran and from Palestine and Lebanon to Cuba, continues to intensify, the conference proceeds with the awareness that merely analyzing the situation is not enough. It aims to take the first steps toward an international initiative capable of uniting the participating organizations, intellectuals, and militants in an uncompromising struggle against imperialism and its loyal ally, Zionism.
For the aggression of imperialism and Zionism, and the declarations referred to above, should long ago have been met by a clear and forceful opposition from organizations claiming to fight for the interests of the laboring masses. Everywhere, the popular masses demonstrate their sensitivity to the atrocities of imperialism, the capitalist class, and Zionism and organize massive mobilizations. Yet the impact of these struggles remains far from reaching its principal objective because of the confusion, fragmentation, and cacophony produced by the long period of political stagnation. The equivocation that begins with "but Hamas" in response to Israel's genocide policy, which is effectively supported by the imperialist powers; the approach that places Russia and the imperialists of all nations on the same footing in the Ukraine war; the objection "yes, but Maduro" when it comes to Venezuela; speaking of a US-China "inter-imperialist rivalry" while ignoring the imperialist encirclement of China and the alliance system being constructed in the Indo-Pacific region, all of these produce almost the same result as the position of the Second International during the World War, which left the socialist movement disarmed in the face of imperialism.
The Anti-NATO Conference aims, by taking as its methodological example the policy pursued by Lenin and the other genuine internationalists and anti-imperialists during the First World War, to determine collectively the policy that must be pursued today. It brings together individuals and organizations, from Latin America to West Asia and from Western Europe to Russia, who maintain an unequivocal position against NATO and who wage an uncompromising struggle against imperialism and Zionism.
The conference, whose principal speakers include the Russian communist Iosif Abramson, now more than one hundred years old; the distinguished Marxist economist Michael Roberts; Vijay Prashad, Indian intellectual and the executive director of the Tricontinental Institute, an organization bringing together the peoples of the Global South; the Brazilian historian and professor at the University of São Paulo, Osvaldo Coggiola; and representatives of EEK and DIP, will be held in seven sessions. The conference will open with a tribute session dedicated to the towering figure of Iosif Abramson, who has devoted his life to communism. The opening session, which will provide a general assessment of imperialism, Zionism, NATO, and the contemporary world situation, will be followed by sessions devoted, respectively, to the situation and the prospects for struggle in Eurasia, West Asia, Europe, and Latin America. The conference will conclude with closing speeches delivered on behalf of EEK and DIP.
There is no longer any time to lose. Forward, not to barbarism, but to the victory of socialism!