The Left in Europe - Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung

From AMADA to PvdA/PTB
Belgium
The Workers’ Party of Belgium (Dutch PvdA/ French:PTB) began as a
Flemish-nationalist student movement in the university city of Louvain
during the late ‘60s. It later spread throughout to the country, abandoned its
nationalist ideology, and adopted Marxism-Leninism. After participation in
a big coal strike, it launched a publication called AMADA, the Dutch Acronym
for “All Power to the Workers” (in French: TPO). In 1979, it held his
first congress, and adopted the name PvdA/PTB. Between 1974 and 1985,
it opposed both American and Soviet imperialism, strong criticising Cuba
and Vietnam, which were allied with the USSR. During the ‘70s, it even
calling for reinforcing NATO and the creation of an anti-Soviet front. After
1985, it gradually changed its view of the USSR.
In Belgium, the PvdA/ PTB has a reputation as a sectarian party, and
with the justification of anti-imperialism has supported all enemies of the
United States, including even such antidemocratic and criminal regimes as
those of Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania and Saddam Hussein in Iraq; it has
also supported the Peruvian “Shining Path” movement of Abimael Guzmán
(“President Gonzalo”). In their view, armed struggle was the only way to
liberate countries anywhere in the world – except Belgium. Such armed
groups as the FARC in Columbia, which negotiated with their governments,
were considered unreliable.
This party is now adopting a more moderate international position and a
more critical view of such countries as China and North Korea. The new
left governments in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador etc. have caused it to revise
its view that armed revolution is the only way to achieve change in
such countries, and to consider that other ways, too, might be possible. It
now has begun to support the Cuban government, too.
During its 2008 Congress, the PvdA/ PTB announced an important renewal.
Several new young leaders were appointed; moreover, the new
Chair announced that the party would abandon its sectarianism, and build
alliances with the rest of the left. It is now recruiting widely among people
with less critical view or even non-critical views of capitalism, and even
people with anticommunist views. Its demands include such concrete and
even reformist measures as the abolition of taxes on energy and lowering
the cost of rubbish bags, and which abandon the perspective of struggle
against capitalism. It no longer considers itself part of the “extreme left”,
but rather simply as part of the “left”, and it is now allied with the Socialist
Party.
12