With an election set for October 25, Tanzania is in the throes of electing its fifth president. The naked corruption of national politics shows how quickly the bosses can steal back whatever crumbs they’ve thrown at the working class. The working class of Tanzania could meet all of its needs—if it weren’t for capitalism.
Since Tanzania’s multi-party system was established in 1992, the ruling party, Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM, or “Party of the Revolution”), has stood openly for capitalism. The CCM descends from the incorrect line of the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), whose platform called for “ujamaa,” or “African socialism.” For all these years, workers voted the CCM in, believing that their leadership would benefit the masses. But throughout the government, politicians have enriched themselves at the expense of the working class.
For decades, leaders from opposition parties appealed to the masses by exposing the corruption of CCM. Events leading up to this year’s election, however, show clearly that electoral politics and allying with the bosses is a lose-lose scenario for workers.
Opposition Parties Are Still Capitalist PartiesFour opposition parties (Chadema, Civic United Front, NCCR-Mageuzi and National League for Democracy) have agreed to get behind one candidate in the hope of defeating CCM. This united front chose former Tanzanian Prime Minister Edward Ngoyai Lowassa as their candidate. In 2008, Lowassa was forced to resign from his position due to the “Richmond Scandal.” During his time as
prime minister, he contracted with a fake company to provide electricity to Tanzania at the outrageous price of $72,380 per day! After convincing Parliament to bless the deal, Lowassa became an extremely wealthy man from the kickbacks. Meanwhile, the vast majority of households and schools lack electricity to this day.
Other “honorable” politicians (the title placed before the name of Tanzanian government officials as a mark of “ethical and credible behavior”), including current President Jakaya Kikwete, were also implicated in the scandal. All of these capitalist servants have contributed mightily to the misery of the masses who earn less than one dollar a day.
Last July, even though Lowassa’s crimes against the working class had been exposed for all to see, the new coalition of four opposition parties (UKAWA) chose him to run against the ruling party. Then CCM declared John Magafuli, the party’s former minister for public works, as their choice. He, too, has committed crimes against the working class. He privatized the nation’s public housing and sold buildings to his friends at low prices, even giving one to his fiancée as a gift! Within days of CCM’s announcement, Lowassa switched over to the opposition coalition and bought or coerced his way to become its candidate. The bosses’ elections are a farce!
PLP: Revolution in Actions and Words
Workers have long been seeking a true revolutionary movement. They have been sharply posing questions like: “What is revolution?” “Why revolution?” “Are the opposition parties capable of fighting for revolution?” “Can corrupt leaders grow to be wise, change sides, and fight for the working class?”
Chadema, one of the opposition parties, has captured the interest of Tanzania’s youth, who are angry and disaffected by government corruption, poor education and lack of jobs. But with Lowassa running for the opposition, many youth and workers are coming to understand that the electoral system cannot lead to meaningful change.
The only way for workers in Tanzania, and worldwide, to move in a revolutionary direction is to reject the idea that “leadership” comes from anywhere but themselves. The working class must reject the entire capitalist system, as well as its election circuses, and join the Progressive Labor Party to fight for communist revolution. The working class, not the capitalist politicians or other ruling-class stooges, will lead the way to create communal ownership of the world’s resources and production. PLP fights for a communist world, where the working class collectively rules to abolish sexism, racism, borders, inequalities, and all forms of exploitation and classes worldwide.
Dear brothers, sisters, mothers and fathers of the world! It is quite true that corruption, sexism, racism and class divisions are the products of the capitalist ruling system. The only way to end this state of affairs is to build a mass international PLP and make a world communist revolution.
Let the working masses join hands together to build a fair and classless world through communist revolution!
MEXICO CITY, October 14—The liberal capitalist bosses and their capitalist-controlled media have been spreading their version of last year’s disappearance of the 43 activist students in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, blaming the “incompetence” of the government of president Enrique Peña Nieto.
But this outrage is not about official incompetence or the brazen corruption of the “justice” institutions. The lack of punishment for the guilty in Ayotzinapa is evidence of the rise of fascism in México. Fascism is reflected in the capitalists’ intensification of racist and sexist violence against the working class. The disappearance of these youth is a racist crime, showing nothing but contempt for the lives of oppressed youth across Mexico!
Why don’t the judicial system, the president and the Mexican Congress give us any answers? Because they need to contain and criminalize workers’ protests, which are in response to our super-exploitation. This criminalization coerces the working class into accepting fascist conditions during this period of capitalist crisis.
Liberal Bosses Pave Road to Fascism
The main weapon the bosses in Mexico are using to contain working-class anger is liberalism. Liberal bosses are capitalists who pretend to be pro-working class. They are calling for citizens to participate within the framework of institutions based on capitalist ideology, like the National Commission on Human Rights (CNDH) or the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (CIDH). As a result of being won to trust in these institutions, the working class organizes itself in a “well-behaved” way that doesn’t fundamentally threaten capitalism. Liberal capitalist bosses and the institutions around them serve an important role in capitalism. They lead the working class away from international class consciousness and from questioning the profit system that lies at the root of the disappearances in Ayotzinapa.
The liberal bosses won’t acknowledge that the 43 students were murdered by capitalist violence. Along with racism and extreme mass poverty, state terror is a clear sign of the rise of fascism here.
The poverty generated by the capitalist system provides the rulers with young people who have no choice but to work under conditions of legalized super-exploitation. Other young people, who lack access to these terrible jobs, are pushed into “illegal” capitalist industries of drug trafficking and organized crime. The students of Ayotzinapa refused to be used by this brutal and fascist capitalist system, and that’s why they were disappeared.
Avenge by Smashing the Bosses and Their Ideas
In the capitalist system under which we live, there’s no justice for workers. The laws and the entire “justice” system are designed to protect private property and the capitalists’ profits. The right of the bosses to enrich themselves requires that the working class—and especially the youth—be controlled both ideologically and through force. In Ayotzinapa, the bosses’ state acted according to the interests it serves. Workers cannot rely on this state to resolve our problems.
The anger and pain of the parents of the disappeared, and of all of us who have stood by them in México and around the world, must not be pacified by the bosses’ institutions. Instead, it must be transformed into political consciousness and organization to bring an end to this criminal capitalist system! Such a system doesn’t deserve to exist! The revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party stands in solidarity with the students of Ayotzinapa, their families and all workers who support this struggle. We call on them to fight for communism, a system organized and run by the working class, where exploitation and anti-worker violence will be punished as crimes. Our victory will be the students’ vengeance! Destroy the capitalist system that exploits, disappears and murders our youth!
Fight for communism, a society of equality!
Ayotzinapa, communism is your fight!
¡Ayotzinapa escucha, el comunismo es tu lucha!
PARIS, October 12 — French airline workers proved last week that they won’t take the capitalist rulers’ cuts “flying down.” In defiance of union misleaders, several hundred workers raided the Air France-KLM headquarters, broke up the Central Works Council meeting and forced the company’s top executives to flee and clamber over a chain-link fence. Two senior execs had their suit jackets and shirts ripped off their backs.
The company provoked workers’ rage by announcing it would eliminate nearly three thousand workers, including pilots, ground crew and flight attendants, and require pilots who kept their jobs to fly 100 hours a year extra with no pay. Whenever capitalist competition cuts into profits, the bosses aim to make workers pay the price.
Air France is also notoriously racist. In 2014, the company marketed their long-haul flights to Asia with an ad campaign featuring white women in yellow-face makeup. More recently, it was revealed that companies chartering planes from Air France could choose the skin color of its cabin crew personnel from a group of 1,166 workers classified as African, Caribbean, Asian, Eurasian, Indian or Western (Le Canard Enchaine, 10/7/15).
Meanwhile, most union leaders condemned the workers’ attacks on the bosses as “acts of aggression.” Pro-boss union delegates were thanked by an airline director for helping him flee the hall. These class traitors try to pacify the rank-and-file by calling one- and two-day “strikes.” About half of the dozen rival unions at Air France have called a “day of action,’ a weasel-word expression that allows “moderate” unions to ask off-duty workers to demonstrate, while more “radical” unions try to organize a walkout. The phony strike failedn—not a single flight had to be cancelled!
Air France is not alone in trying to solve the bosses’ economic problems on the workers’ backs. Lufthansa, the German airline, has had several strikes over the past two years over plans to cut jobs and base crews in countries with lower wage and working conditions. SAS and Norwegian have seen work stoppages this year over staffing and pay, while baggage handlers in Spain have struck Ryanair for months. In both France and Spain, air traffic controllers have struck over job security and wages.
Once again, the French Socialist government revealed its pro-capitalist colors by aggressively pursuing those who attacked the bosses; five workers were hauled in for questioning on October 12. After the French presidential elections next April, Air France plans to axe another five thousand jobs. The current cuts are intended to soften up workers before that knockout punch.
Airline workers need to take the throttle away from their pro-boss union leaders and wage an all-out fight against the cutbacks, and against the capitalist system that demands them.
When U.S. President Barack Obama traveled to Kenya and Ethiopia this summer, capitalist rulers in both Africa and the U.S. worked overtime to foster illusions about the trip. The chair of the African Union Commission, Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma, called it a “historic visit” and a “concrete step to broaden and deepen the relationship between the U.S. and the AU.” The bosses’ media focused on future benefits promised by Obama: a joint campaign against terrorism, shared technology, and the alleviation of poverty in sub-Saharan Africa, where one in three people are undernourished and more than 250 million live without access to clean water (borgenproject.com).
But Obama’s true mission was hidden. His real job was to counter recent inroads in Africa by Chinese bosses, and to pave the way for more U.S. capitalist investment—and more exploitation of African workers. Of particular interest to the U.S. rulers: gas extraction in Tanzania’s Mtwara region, oil production and power supply, and an expanding market for U.S. industrial goods, including firearms to warring ethnic groups.
Addressing the African Union, Obama said the U.S. planned to provide an additional 30,000 megawatts to 60 million households and business in Africa. He also pledged to assist African governments to eradicate terrorism—a point of rank hypocrisy, since up to half of U.S. arms sales to corrupt militaries in Uganda and Burundi have wound up in the hands of the al-Shabab terror group (wired.com, 8/2/11).
Obama, who serves the main finance capital wing of the U.S. ruling class, pushed both Kenya and Ethiopia to enter the fight against al-Shabab. In fact, the U.S. government has played a concealed but significant role in arming groups like al-Shabab, Al Qaeda and Boko Haram. The capitalists’ strategy is to divide populations into ethnic groups and promote conflict and civil war, making the working class more vulnerable to imperialist exploitation. It’s no accident that U.S. government aid is funneled to countries with productive oil reserves, like Libya, Egypt and Sudan, or to areas in Tanzania where natural gas and coal as well as oil have been discovered. To shore up its control of these markets, U.S. imperialism invaded Libya and backed the forces that assassinated President Muammar Gaddafi.
African workers cannot rely on the African Union and its ruling-class governments, all of which profit from racism, sexism, and capitalist inequality. Only a communist revolution can eliminate mass poverty and establish a society that serves workers’ needs!
Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran—hailed by the capitalists’ liberal media as a step back from global war—is in fact a strategic move toward broader imperialist conflict. It is another sign that the U.S. bosses are not yet ready to launch an all-out invasion, at least not until they’ve put their own house in order. The current U.S. presidential campaign, with the Republican Party in disarray and leading Democrat Hillary Clinton even less trusted by voters than Donald Trump (washingtonpost.com, 8/20/15), reflects the rulers’ predicament. For now, they have neither the political leadership nor the working-class base for a new military draft, an essential element in a major ground war.
The workers of Iran have suffered under more than 30 years of U.S. sanctions on trade, finance, energy, and technology. These restrictions have sent the prices of meat, milk, bread, and medicine soaring. Workers have been forced to buy on a black market run by the same officials and military officers supposedly targeted by the U.S. ruling class. Obama’s “peace” pact is designed to end these sanctions in return for a 10- to 15-year pause in Tehran’s nuclear weapons program. The U.S. bosses hope the agreement will buy them time to mobilize to fight the larger imperialist wars coming down the road, most likely against China or Russia or both.
From Iran to China to Detroit, the Progressive Labor Party is fighting to unite workers in a mass international organization. We aim to smash imperialism with communist revolution, and to build a world without the horrors of child-killing sanctions or war. The international working class can’t rely on phony deals made between the biggest thieves on the planet. We need a world where we run society for ourselves!
U.S. Bosses Know War Is Coming
In their 2015 edition of The National Military Strategy, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff—the top uniformed servants of U.S. imperialism—estimate that an “interstate war with a major power” is a “growing” probability. A related article published by the U.S. Army War College (Strategic Studies Institute, 4/8/15) warns: “….the United States has almost no excess industrial or logistics infrastructure, or human capacity to mobilize for war.” To address this looming crisis, the article argues, U.S. bosses must end their internal partisan splits, raise taxes to finance their military, and most likely restore the draft. As the author concedes, none of this will be easy:
The public might bear these costs if the stakes were high enough, but policymakers could not automatically assume so…. Today, the public is unaccustomed to crushing taxation or postponed consumption. It would not take long for dissatisfaction to grow, possibly generating pressure to negotiate a settlement short of victory.
This is a prescription, plain and simple, for more fascism: lower wages, higher taxes and prices, more racism and racist police terror to stave off insurrection, and millions of working-class children conscripted for imperialist slaughter.
Sign Now, Slaughter Later
For Iran’s capitalist bosses, expanding their dominance in the Middle East matters more than any short-term deal with the U.S. For decades, the U.S. bosses have been waging trillion-dollar wars to secure their control over the region’s oil—a “vital” national interest, according to the Carter Doctrine espoused in 1980 by President Jimmy Carter. Today, Iran and the U.S. are locked in proxy wars in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Bahrain, Lebanon, and Israel/Palestine. As Majid Rafizadeh, a Harvard-affiliated Iran watcher, observed in the Huffington Post (9/26/15):
Tehran is so deeply entrenched in the well-established and instituted ideological, sectarian (Sunni vs. Shia), and ethnic (Persians vs. Arabs) norms that it is impossible for the government and Iranian leaders to change the character of the state.
Translation: The Iranian bosses aren’t likely to ally with the U.S. any time soon.
U.S. strategists acknowledge that Obama’s Iran gamble may turn out badly. Under President Vladimir Putin, Russia has countered U.S. sanctions with technical, military, and diplomatic aid to Iran. Most recently, Russia “moved to expand its political and military influence in the Syria conflict” with an agreement to share intelligence on the Islamic State with Iran, along with Iraq and Syria (New York Times, 9/27/15).
Richard Haass, head of the Council on Foreign Relations (a leading think tank bankrolled by U.S. finance capital), has sounded the alarm over a potential alliance between Iran, Russia and China. Haass favors Obama’s nuclear deal because “it buys you 10 or 15 years” (MSNBC, 7/27/15), but warns, “there is also the danger that Iran will fail to comply….What matters is that non-compliance be met with renewed sanctions and, if needed, military force” (Huffington Post, 7/15/15).
Turn Imperialist War Into Class War!
The workers of the world have nothing to gain by relying on any boss. Capitalism can bring us only more terror. The laws of imperialist competition will compel capitalist rulers on all sides to intensify fascist terror—to discipline our class and force us into their military killing machines. The Progressive Labor Party is building our movement in more than two dozen countries. It is open to all workers, students and soldiers who want a world free of racism, sexism and imperialism. Join us! Help us turn imperialist war into class war for communism!
