CARTAGENA, COLOMBIA, April 16 — At the Summit of the Americas, the celebrity singer Shakira sang the Colombian anthem. She portrayed a microcosm of what imperialism has in store for Latin America.
Shakira announced that she’s sponsoring new educational projects throughout Latin America covering 6.200 children of the 35 million who have no access to any type of education. This educative philanthropic project, which earns her great economic dividends, will “resolve” the educational problems of 0.018 percent of the continent’s children.
Lecturing hundreds of the Summit’s capitalists about her “new” education idea, she said that investment in early education is a promising business which can net surprising profits. She maintained that each dollar invested could reap $17 in profit in adulthood. She knows this from the tax privileges she has enjoyed in Colombia and in other countries. She repeated the usual formula that education can end poverty and that her 17-year philanthropic project in education has redeemed six million children.
She criticized as “obsolete and old fashioned” the idea that the State must provide education. “Education not only helps masses emerge from poverty” but “is a virtue converting them into potential clients.” Thus, investors win double: gaining direct returns in education and assuring future buyers of their products, earning profit as businessmen and world fame as philanthropists, like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and George Soros.
This capitalist lecture about education is not new. It’s the same one repeated by a bunch of technocrats and economists made in USA: university deans, Board of Education speakers, the World Bank and the fascist educators. But what’s new is that an out-of-tune singer presented this project. She declared that capitalist philanthropy is the best way to solve poverty and achieve “the sure prosperity that we deserve and have always dreamt.” As we know, capitalism’s dreams are workers’ nightmares.
Lesson No. 1: Capitalist Philanthropy
What happened in the orgy that Obama’s secret service agents organized in Cartagena matches what U.S. ambassadors, secret service agents, military advisers and mercenaries are used to doing: sexist imperialism. They transform places they visit into brothels and prostitute young native girls, carried out with a death threat, as if it were an honor for women in those lands. This is how U.S. capitalists see Latin American countries and their people: as brothels occupied by poverty-stricken prostitutes, with their governments as unconditional pimps. The Colombian government, protected by U.S. imperialists, just demonstrated this in fine detail.
Lesson No. 2: The Free Trade Agreement
The Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between Colombia and the U.S. is exploitation on a grand scale, a product of inter-imperialist contradictions. In Colombia, where part of these contradictions develop, its capitalists kneel before bosses from China, Spain and North America, fighting for control of the country’s natural resources.
With a smile of betrayal from those that know they have traded Colombia’s riches for a plate of lentils to the imperialist U.S., various Colombian government speakers announced that starting May 15th the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement will go into effect. In reality, this happened since the Cartagena Summit.
Unemployment will increase with the arrival of U.S. products, but the official advertisers and their media of misinformation assure that new jobs will be created more than ever.
While the FTA increases harassment and murders of union members and workers’ leaders in Colombia, U.S. governmental circles and those in Colombia maintain the agreement is a “blessing” for unions. The insatiable search for natural riches and the construction of infrastructure routes to transport products to the U.S. will destroy ecosystems, seas, rivers and forests but journalists say this will mean more environmental protection and exploitation of these riches.
What remains of education will be privatized, but they assure us that such measures will improve services and the flow of private businessmen who will take us out of poverty and underdevelopment, like Shakira. But all they do is generalize illiteracy and ignorance. The brutal import of U.S. junk food will destroy the feeble foundations of agricultural production, but they assure us that our diet and nutritional habits will improve eating this trash.
Lesson No. 3: ‘Humanism’ of the Colombian State
In a clear demonstration of state humanism, the Colombian State’s oppressing forces swept Cartagena street by street, house by house, to oust the poor from the city’s center because they “made it ugly” and were a bad showcase for the sale of Colombia to transnational capital. They even removed the dogs, along with the homeless, the street vendors, popular cooks and anyone else in the way.
Avenues were remodeled so that Barack Obama’s caravan of about 20 limousines and expensive cars wouldn’t have to stop anywhere in its way. The city militarized itself as never before, employing thousands of police, military, secret agents, divers and pilots to guard it.
The price of these security measures, along with the Summit’s expenses, may have reached $100 million, while schools, hospitals, parks or universities go wanting. This shows how public resources are only used in big measures to pay the external debt and finance the war against Colombia’s exploited.
Workers Great Potential
The world’s workers have risen and organized themselves under reformist ideas. Struggles from Brazil to Afghanistan have shown the great potential we workers have, but we will only see change if the workers are led by communist ideas. Our Party will be present on May Day, commemorating the day of struggle of the international working class. Conscious that there’s still much to do, we will raise our red communist flags to continue the road that communists from the past began. Workers’ class struggles have taught us that communist ideas are needed to destroy this parasitic and murderous system, to build with the Progressive Labor Party a communist society that will free us from slavery.
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Afghanistan: CIA Plot Led to 33 Years of Wars on Workers
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- 09 May 2012 72 hits
In the first week of May a new underground youth group plastered Kabul with hundreds of posters depicting former warlords as criminals and denouncing the U.S. and Karzai who gave them government positions in 2001.
April 28 was Mujahadin Victory Day, a national holiday celebrating the defeat of a Marxist government in 1992 by the fundamentalist warlords — known collectively as mujahadin — and the establishment of an Islamist state. For Afghans the day is a brutal reminder of the tens of thousands killed, the rape of thousands of women and children and the destruction of Kabul that followed as the seven groups that made up the U.S.-backed mujahadin fought for territory and power until driven to the north by Taliban forces four years later.
The youth group’s proclamation, “Enough is enough! We will no longer be a witness to your corrupt and predatory ways,” reflects the popular mood. Political parties are organizing, clandestinely and openly, to break the hold of the ruling class and the unbearable conditions of daily life.
Capitalism the Problem, Communism the Answer
Afghans once organized a movement, influenced by Marxist ideas that identified capitalism as the root of the vast economic disparity between rich and poor, advancing communism as the solution to end it. The idea that communism is needed to eliminate capitalist forces that are currently oppressing Afghans is taking hold again.
Starting in the 1960s among university students, a movement spread into the urban and rural working class. “We thought that money and wealth is concentrated in just a small class of the society,” said a former student at Kabul University, “that socialism is the only way for poor people to be equal, to receive what they work for.” Dedicated young men and women formed clandestine study circles that became a force in raising the political consciousness of the whole population. Peasant uprisings, labor stoppages, student strikes and demonstrations paralyzed the country in 1968.
Ten years later the Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan, (PDPA) the largest of the Marxist parties came to power. The popular new government cut food prices, raised wages, opened health clinics and schools, confiscated the land of the old aristocracy and redistributed it to the peasants. New laws ended the practice of bride price. Women and minorities were given equal rights.
All gains made when the PDPA was in power are gone. During those years, despite the intervention of the imperialists, and the PDPA’s own mistakes, from 1978 to 1992 conditions for Afghans improved tremendously: jobs were created and hospitals and schools built. Women made great gains: half the university students in the country were women; women were 40 percent of Afghanistan’s doctors, 70 percent of its teachers and 30 percent of its civil servants.
Counter-revolutionaries, wealthy landowners and fundamentalists sabotaged the new programs and spread anti-government misinformation. They joined the jihad — religious war — against the communists which the CIA was secretly organizing in Pakistan, funded by the U.S and Saudi Arabia. Maoists, who followed the Chinese anti-Soviet line, calling the PDPA puppets of the Russians, joined them. Over the next ten years, at a cost of $40 billion, the U.S. recruited, supplied, and trained — militarily and ideologically — almost 100,000 jihadis or mujahadin from Afghanistan and 40 countries. (This included Osama bin Laden who bankrolled the jihad and later formed al Qaeda.)
The broader U.S. aim was to draw its imperialist rival, the Soviet Union, into a trap, a debilitating war. Russian forces went into Afghanistan in support of the government in December 1979, starting 33 years of war for Afghans as the country became the battleground of a 10-year proxy war between the USSR and the U.S. One million Afghans were killed, four million fled, many to Pakistan and Iran, and the economy and infrastructure of the country were devastated.
The legacy of these war years has left deep scars on Afghan society.
But although the promise of equality was never fulfilled, the idea of an egalitarian communist society motivated thousands of Afghans then and still does today. In Afghanistan and working class areas of Europe and the U.S. where many Afghan exiles live, Afghans are looking at why the old movement failed, in order to find a way forward.
They identify the egotism of some within the PDPA leadership, who focused on building a power base, dividing the party in a struggle between two factions rather than developing communist ideology.
The PDPA took power in an army coup organized by military officers, and although the party had an estimated 25,000 members, it lacked a strong base among the working class. Its attempts at a transformation of society was misunderstood by some and met with resistance, especially in the countryside, where wealthy landowners with religion and coercion dominated rural workers.
The party had close ties to the Soviet communist party, which professed anti-nationalism in theory but in practice made little effort to build an international working-class movement.
In the year after the PDPA took power certain corrupt leaders brought in supporters whose interest was personal gain, not building an egalitarian society. They imprisoned and killed those who opposed them including innocent civilians and under the banner of communism alienated the unorganized masses, making them open to the intensive, anticommunist propaganda of the Afghan ruling class, the U.S. and Arab fundamentalists.
The Afghan communists followed the theory of socialism as a stage to communism, practiced by the USSR and China. PLP, in “Road to Revolution 4,” analyzed that experience and concluded that socialism reverts back to capitalism.
Today PLP rejects the two-stage theory, nationalism, racism, sexism and the cult of leadership. We are building a mass international party to fight directly for communism and invite the heroic Afghan comrades who have kept the ideas of an egalitarian society alive to join us.
One World, One Flag, One Party.
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International Working-Class Solidarity Crucial; Imperialist Dogfight: U.S.-India Axis vs. China’s Bosses Would Kill Millions
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- 25 April 2012 75 hits
On April 19, India’s capitalist rulers, quietly urged on by U.S. President Obama, successfully tested a long-range ballistic missile that can carry a nuclear warhead. The New York Times, the U.S. rulers’ leading mouthpiece, immediately boasted that the missile was “capable of reaching Beijing and Shanghai.” This account fostered the growing possibility of a third world war, probably nuclear.
An intensifying arms race embroils India, China and the U.S. It stems from growing competition among imperialists for global market share amid limited resources, especially energy. Capitalists, organized as nation states, need to threaten their rival exploiters with the deadliest military force possible. They must also have allies ready for the inevitable day when their jockeying for profit sources — like oil from the Middle East — explodes into global armed conflict.
At present, China’s and U.S. bosses are on a military collision course. In population, China outnumbers the U.S. four to one. So U.S. rulers must count heavily on troops from India (pop. 1.2 billion) to stem Chinese advances. In 2005, Admiral Michael Mullen proposed a multinational, U.S.-led “Thousand Ship Navy,” with a large component fleet from India to police China’s oil trade. Last year, however, “Indian Defence Minister A.K. Antony ruled out India joining such a group unless it is under a U.N. mandate” (Defense News, 5/25/11).
World’s Workers Would Be Main Victims of Nuclear War
The fact that the next world war will kill tens of millions of workers never enters into the equation for these imperialist rulers. They only consider how their overwhelming stock of weaponry, both conventional and atomic, will give them the upper hand in their drive to exploit the greatest possible number of the world’s workers.
India’s recent rocket test reveals U.S. rulers’ desperation to enlist India’s billion-plus workers as “coalition” cannon (or nuclear-bomb) fodder in a coming war. As the Times (4/19/12) explained, “The Obama administration... is now cultivating alliances with Asian nations and redirecting its strategic and military focus toward Asia to manage China’s new military clout.”
Most of Obama’s current crop of foreign policy advisers hails from the Rockefeller-funded Center for a New American Security (see CHALLENGE, 4/25). This think tank endorses an anti-China “India Initiative” because the economic, political, and military rise of India “is reshaping world politics and promises to make India both a true global power and one of the most important bilateral partners for the United States.”
After the launch, U.S. stooge and NATO head Ander Fogh Rasmussen said that the trans-Atlantic alliance did not perceive India as a threat. The Nation, a Pakistani newspaper, pointed to Indian efforts to catch up to China: “Only recently, India ordered 126 fighter jets from the French firm Dassault, one of the biggest arms deals in the recent past. Furthermore, New Delhi has purchased nuclear submarines from Russia and is seeking to modernize its tank fleet. In 2011, the country was the world’s biggest purchaser of arms” (4/21/12).
For now, China and the U.S. both profit from the arrangement by which the U.S. buys Chinese goods while China buys U.S. Treasury bonds. But this harmonious dynamic can’t last much longer. Ultimately, these two powers may very well settle their economic rivalry in imperialist war although other imperialist powers like Russia can become involved. China’s burgeoning industry will soon require tens of millions of barrels of oil per day, more than its sole oil-rich Middle East ally, Iran, can supply. China won’t forever endure being a mere buyer of Saudi crude, which is controlled by Exxon Mobil. Nor will it indefinitely tolerate the U.S.-paid mercenaries guarding Chinese wells in Iraq.
Beijing’s bosses, already building naval bases in Pakistan and Burma, are taking further steps to counter U.S. dominance of Indian Ocean oil routes from the Middle East. Three Chinese warships are patrolling the Red Sea against “pirates.” With blue-water aircraft carriers and submarines already in shipyards, “China’s defence spending could overtake America’s after 2035” (The Economist, 4/7/12).
Repercussions Likely from Al Qaeda and Russia
Zbigniew Brzezinski envisions the Indian navy and army helping to “encircle” rising China (see his 2012 book, “Strategic Vision”). As National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter, Brzezinski was the architect of the Carter Doctrine. It stipulated that control of Middle East oil supplies was in the strategic interest of the U.S. and had to be protected at all costs, by military means if necessary. This policy has been adopted by all subsequent U.S. presidents.
But Brzezinski offers three cautions against “a formal U.S.-India alliance.” First, a treaty might entangle the U.S. in a land war even less winnable than Korea and Vietnam: “It would increase the likelihood of U.S. involvement in potentially prolonged and bitter Asian conflicts.” Second, “It would increase Moscow’s temptations to take advantage of a distracted America drawn into wider Asian conflicts to assert Russian imperialist interests more firmly in Central Asia and central Europe.” Third, it might heighten “the appeal of anti-American terrorism among Muslims.”This includes Pakistan, India’s arch enemy.
Asian Nuke Threats are U.S. Bosses’ Best Hope to Maintain Profits
U.S. bosses prefer nuclear weapons — their own, India’s or NATO’s — as an end run around costly ground wars that favor their enemies in Asia. Their defeats in Korea and Vietnam have made them cherish their genocidal 1945 atomic slaughter at Hiroshima and Nagasaki all the more. These atomic bomb strikes against civilian populations served U.S. rulers well. They were a powerful warning to Stalin’s Soviet Union — then without nuclear weapons — that it would face similar destruction if it challenged U.S. post-World War II global supremacy.
By any sane estimate, conventional U.S. forces, however technologically superior, would fail miserably in assaulting China’s mainland. That’s why Obama keeps his thumb (and those of his Indian allies) on the nuclear trigger to check China’s advances, uncaring that its use would kill millions of workers.
But the one factor that all imperialist bosses tend to ignore is the potential strength of international working-class solidarity. After all, the ruling class and their henchmen constitute barely three percent of the world’s population. The world’s working class, when organized and led by a revolutionary communist party, the Progressive Labor Party, represents the exploited billions whose interests run exactly counter to their exploiters. The same workers compose the imperialist armies that can be won to turn the guns on their oppressors. Without their rank-and-file soldiers, the bosses are powerless.
This is the internationalism that we celebrate on May Day. And this is the force that can destroy the racist system of capitalism and usher in a new world run by and for the working class. Crucial to this goal is the building of the communist PLP. Join us and march on May Day!
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Students Get Communist Education at Anti-Cutback Rally
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- 25 April 2012 75 hits
AUSTIN, TX, March 24 — Over 4,000 protestors descended on the state capitol to stand against cutbacks in education. Though the march was smaller than last year’s rally of 12,000, the crowd was much more militant, and the forces around the Party have grown substantially.
PL teachers and workers organized nearly 30 students and several parents to travel from surrounding cities to Austin. On the ride, one teacher organized students to make signs. After lots of discussion, one student made the connection between imperialist war and the budget cuts to education. Her sign declared “Less bombs, more schools!” Others made signs attacking the local school board and their decision to gut college readiness programs like AVID. One sign read “RIP Our Future” with the word “AVID” on the tombstone.
We also discussed how instead of begging the bosses to “Save Our Schools,” we should use slogans like “Students, Teachers, and Parents Unite to Fight School Cuts.” The latter declaration separates us from the enemy, the administrators and local school board members. One teacher pointed out a contradiction: even though the school board president and superintendent attended the rally, they are the ones implementing all the cuts.
At the march grounds, busloads from all over the state began assembling: student teachers in training all the way from the University of Texas, El Paso, and teachers, students and parents from Dallas, Houston and San Antonio. A student drumline in the front of the march set the militant tone. As the march proceeded, the chant promoted by the organizers “Save our schools” was seen by many as too weak. Many friends of PLP were won to chant the more militant, “When they say cut back, we say fight back! Cut back! Fight back!” When a group of students started the “Fight-back” chant, others around began joining in. Rally organizers quickly drowned out our calls to “Fight back” with their calls to “Give me a V, give me an O, give me a T, give me an E!”
The students who attended saw a distinction between the liberal call to “VOTE” and the calls in the PL leaflet for working-class unity and communist revolution. PL’ers sold the latest CHALLENGE and passed out over 500 PLP leaflets.
One student who read the PL leaflet said that he did not believe a passage that said schools are more segregated now than in 1968. A teacher who is a friend of PL’ers but not yet in the Party defended the leaflet, informing the student that the leaflet was correct and that racism in education is getting worse, not better.
In the end, students gained a valuable experience, reporting that they never knew there were so many people who were angry about the cutbacks in education and the new state exam called STAAR. For many of these students, this was the first march they have ever been to, and they now have more of a fighting spirit.
Many of the Party’s flyers and papers ended up in the hands of the students who traveled to Austin and many more were brought back to students, teachers and parents who were unable to attend. Over the next few weeks we are making plans for a study group around the flyer and other anti-cutback materials. Students are also organizing to confront local board members at the next meetings about the planned cuts.
The rally against the cutbacks in education was a huge success for the Party. As we move forward to May Day, we hope to gain many new fighters for the working class!
