Socialist Resistance

A range of international speakers have now been confirmed for Socialist Resistance’s day school on broad left parties on Saturday 28 June. Recent developments in the Workers Party (PT) Brazi, the Italian Rifondazione Comunista and Respect in England and Wales have once again sparked debate about the strategy of building broad anti-capitalist parties and their relationship to the tactics of revolutionaries.

Speakers confirmed include Miguel Reis from the Left Bloc in Portugal as well as speakers from Die Linke in Germany, the Dutch Socialist Party and the LCR in France, currently in the middle of a highly successful campaign to found a new, broad socialist party. Speakers from Britain will include Joseph Healy, from Green Left, and Alan Thornett from Socialist Resistance. The conference starts 10.30am, June 28 at ULU, Malet Street, London.

Socialist Resistance supporters in Birmingham have launched a new website.

Click here to visit it

Their next public meeting is on Tuesday 17th June at 7.30 in Bennett’s Bar at which Alan Thornett will be talking about the need for political trade unionism. Download the flyer from the link below.

Flyer.

New government – old faces

Elections in Pakistan last February put an end to the military dictatorship of General Pervez Musharaf - but not, it seems, to its policies. The new coalition government of radical Islamists and bourgeois nationalists maintains close relations with the military, is continuing a neo-liberal agenda and still supports the alliance with US imperialism.
Farooq Tariq of the Labour Party Pakistan told a recent Socialist Resistance Forum that this turbulent period had nonetheless opened up possibilities for the left in Pakistan.

The socialist Labour Party Pakistan (LPP), with 3000 members and 100 elected councillors across the country, has led high-profile campaigns on land rights, privatisation, women’s rights, child labour and other issues afecting workers and the poor. It boycotted the elections of 18 February because it opposes neo-liberalism and any alliance with pro-military parties.

Farooq Tariq was asked how much had really changed in Pakistan since the elections. “This is a new government with old faces,”he replied. “Musharaf had to withdraw martial law and take off his military uniform but he is still in a powerful position as president.”

The three capitalist parties in the coalition government are the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) of the murdered Benazir Bhutto, the Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz and the Awami National Party.

“The present so-called democratic government is discrediting itself, happy to bring in the most corrupt people to the top jobs,” Farooq Tariq explained. These people collaborate with the generals who continue to dominate all aspects of economic life. The military still owns 12% of all agricultural land and it’s other interests include huge holdings in dairy farms, fertilizer factories, banks, contruction and insurance.

The government is even trying to reinstate the judges who supported the military in last year’s movement to bring down Musharaf.

Neo-liberalism is alive and well with privatisation the cornerstone of the government’s programme. The price of flour has doubled, petrol has increased by 20% and rail fares have shot up by 15%. The PPP has talked of raising the minimum wage but has taken no steps to propose a new law on this to parliament. The majority of workers, meanwhile, are not even receiving the original minimum.

Benazir Bhutto’s assassination in December 2007 brought the state to a complete standstill for five days. Such was the chaos and public outrage, said Farooq Tariq, that Bhutto’s party could have successfully demanded Musharaf’s resignation there and then. “But before her death Benazir had agreed to work with Musharaf.”

There has been no let-up in the repression of oppositionists (Farooq Tariq himself has been imprisoned five times in the last year) and thousands of those who disappeared during the miltary dictatorship - most of them religious fundamentalists - are still missing. Yet because of the massive anti-Musharaf consciousness before the election and the emergence of a young radicalised middle class Farooq Tariq reported ‘all left parties are growing’.

The Labour Party Pakistan initiated the peasant movement that started in the Punjab in 2001 after the military tried to take over 68,000 acres for agribusiness. Against the background of a small and weak trade union movement it is trying to nurture a radical trade union formation in Karachi and Lahore. The party’s strongest support comes from the north west frontier province and from Baluchistan in the south west where the massive exploitation of gas has been threatening people’s land and livelihoods.

The LPP has also recruited over 100 new members from Pakistan’s militant movement of lawyers. The anti-Musharaf movement sprang up last year after Chief Justice Iftikar Muhammad Chaudry defied Musharaf and after many judges and lawyers who protested at the repression were themselves arrested and beaten.

The LPP sees scope for building a small mass party of the left. It is calling for new elections under the auspices of an independent electoral commission and with proportional representation. That would give left parties a chance to be represented in parliament, Farooq Tariq explained.

“Right now”, he argued, “anything can happen. I don’t think Musharaf can survive but other parties may back the military as they have in the past and there is the possibility of the military retaking power… That’s why we have to strengthen the mass movement and build an alternative.”

Young people murdering each other now appears to be a feature of life in modern Britain. The standard policy response is criminalisation and more powers for the police. Ryan Ferguson sets the issue in a wider context and offers some pointers to a socialist response.

One way of approaching a discussion about young people, alienation and crime would be to configure it with a proposed sense of ‘realism’. Young people commit most crime, this can be seen from the criminal justice data, and the source of this criminality lays somewhere between the structures imposed on them by capitalism, the poverty and deprivation that has characterises the lives of many young people, the alienation this causes and the embedded dislike of the police and other authorities in local areas.

The necessary prescription is then to produce a series of policies that address both the atomisation and alienation that working class youth face and to provide the resources at a local level that would divert them away from criminal activity.

The problem with such an approach is that it accepts the construction of youth crime and alienation from the perspective of those who have power in society, reinforces the dialogue that views youth crime as a particular and specific sort or problem that requires specific and particular solutions that are, in the main, supplied by criminal justice institutions.

The notion of ‘crime’ for the most part operates as a construct that focuses on the harms in society that are perpetrated by the powerless. Looking at those regulated by the criminal justice system we see overwhelmingly the young, the poor, disproportionately black and minority ethnic and those with mental health and educational problems from working class backgrounds – for the most part that part of the working class that is easiest for the system identify and round up – particularly those with mental heath or behavioural problems.

Home can be the most dangerous place

Of those in prison 94% are there for non-violent offences – that is over 75,000 of the 80,000 at any one time. The 5,000 mainly young men in prison for violent offences represent less that half of one percent of the sustained inter-personal violence that takes place in society. Academic research shows that 99.5% of acts of serious violence in society do not trouble the criminal justice system – the overwhelming majority of which takes place in private, both physical and sexual, are committed by heterosexual men in the home against their partners and children and by the serious organisational violence experienced by those at work which, it is estimated, outstrips by some distance the public violence that is reported to and the focus of the criminal justice system.

So whilst we should be concerned about intoxicated young men inflicting pain on each other on Friday nights as part of a general aspect of a particular construction of masculinity and the behaviours of boys on the street that range from graffiti to assault for material gain with much else in between, these are problems which pale into insignificance next to the serious harms that take place in society. Even the violence associated with the illegal drugs trade whose customer interface and market security functions are staffed by young men and boys, fails to wreak one per cent of the social havoc, violence and harm of the legal drugs trade in alcohol and tobacco.

In this context anyone seeking to debate young people, crime and alienation should do so first by challenging the dominant constructions about who is harmed and why and by whom and exactly who is alienated and from what. For example, the elderly disproportionately express fears about what young people are doing on the streets and fears of being mugged. Yet they are the least likely to be the victims of such an event.

The numbers of elderly attacked and murdered by unknown youths are so small that it is not possible to do a serious analysis. However, the numbers subject to adult familial assault, inter-personal theft, and abuse both at home and in care homes should be an issue for concern. For the most part the intra-familial alienation and power inequality that produces such an outcome is not seriously considered.

“Social murder” of the elderly

Describing the conditions of the working class in Victorian England Engels described the early deaths due to the terrible social conditions experienced by the working class as ‘social murder’. The mugging and ‘social murder’ of the 20,000 elderly who die of cold annually because they cannot afford to heat their homes should be a subject for serious discussion; the fact that millions of elderly live in one room in the winter because they cannot afford to heat all of their homes creates mass alienation. Alongside this the projection of fears onto young people need to be challenged through a dialogue that expresses working class solidarity rather than any narrative that encourages inter-working class antipathy.

This, of course, is not to discount the harm that is caused by the criminalisation of drugs, the fear experienced when being threatened by a young male on the street, nor the devastation caused to a family or community by the recent spike in murders of young people on the streets of the poorer parts of London. The point is, though, that they are part of a much broader picture of serious social harm in a capitalist society riven by inequalities of gender, ethnicity and class of which young people are, in the main, are the victims of unequal power structures.

Placed in the context of this broader picture, the harms perpetrated by young people should be understood less as a response to a felt alienation from society and more as an apprenticeship in a society that is riddled with and held together by such harmful processes perpetrated by both individuals and organisations. Whatever youthful activity society finds uncomfortable and liberal opinion may put down to ‘alienation’ or ‘anomie’ is usually behaviour modelled on the activity of adult society.

For the most part young people are not alienated in the popular sense of the term but are simply beginning to participate in the multiplicity of harmful events that take place on a daily basis in the type of neo-liberal and patriarchal society in which we live. That they are the objectified subject of an inordinate amount of liberal policy hand wringing and authoritarian criminal justice intervention results from their lack of power rather than the harm they cause.

Any political break from this political impasse needs to start from two places. First, the left must articulate a policy that explains that working class young people are some of the least harmful actors in society – the facts are present to do this. Second it must develop a local policy that challenges the idea that criminal justice is the first port of call to deal with local area problems. The anxieties that people feel about local public safety can be challenged by acts of working class solidarity rather than waiting for the flashing blue light that inevitably arrives too late. It is not police neighbourhood watch committees that are required but the organisation of class solidarity of the street, but for such an approach to become a national phenomenon requires a mass left wing party to organise it.

 Piers Mostyn looks at the bloody truth behind the creation of the Israeli State and its legacy of war, racism, ecological devestation, national oppression and poverty. This article will be in the next issue of Socialist Resistance due out next month.

On the 14^th of May 1948, the state of Israel was proclaimed. Its foundational myths are that the Zionist colonisers were Davids fighting a Goliath, compelled by the Holocaust to carve out a haven of safety, with no desire to force out the indigenous Palestinians who departed voluntarily.

But that falsity has been exposed. The opening up of official records under the 30 year rule led to a thorough re-examination by Israel’s “revisionist” historians - like Ilan Pappe and Benny Morris - who revealed that 1948 was in fact a brutal act of mass ethnic cleansing.

The Palestinians call 1948 the Nakhba (catastrophe). Its roots stretching back to the end of the 19^th century, it involved driving the Palestinian people off their land, to make way for a colonial settler state acting as a regional agent for imperialism. That war continues today.

The first Zionist migrants arrived in Palestine in 1882 and the first Zionist Congress was held 15 years later. But Zionism before World War I was a very small movement, marginal even among Jewish refugees fleeing the wave of anti-Semitism sweeping across Eastern Europe; the vast majority settling in the West where they helped energise the rising tide of the left.

Aware of their weak position, Zionist leaders sought sponsorship from the imperial powers, initially the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Czar and the German Kaiser. Britain became the preferred option when it filled the vacuum left by the break up of the Ottoman Empire in World War I. After World War II the USA took the mantle.

Two key events triggering the Nakhba were the formation of a special committee by the United Nations (UNSCOP) in February 1947 to formulate recommendations on future status and a British announcement in September 1947 that Britain’s “Mandate” to run Palestine since 1923 would end on the 15^th of May 1948.

The majority of UNSCOP recommended partition into two states. It conceded that this contradicted the principle of self determination; a cornerstone of international relations and widely held as applicable to Palestine following the disintegration of Ottoman rule.

At the time Jews comprised one third of the population, owning 7% of the land. Despite this UNSCOP proposed that the Jewish state occupy 58% of the British mandate territory with the Palestinian two thirds majority, owning 90% of the land, getting the rest.

Not surprisingly the Palestinians rejected partition as totally unacceptable. The UNSCOP minority, favouring one federal state, warned of the long term dangers.

The main movers behind partition at the UN were the USA and USSR. Their cynical support for Zionism was motivated by cold war jockeying for position and a desire to hegemonise the oil rich region. Despite abstaining, Britain soon became a stalwart supporter. The support of the social democratic and Stalinist leaderships significantly undermined the prospects for building international solidarity with the Palestinians in the decades that followed.

Zionist militias, active for nearly two decades, had been preparing. Within a fortnight of UNSCOP’s recommendations being adopted by the UN in November 1947 the first expulsions of Palestinians began. By March 1948 the Zionist military campaign had begun in earnest.

In the first phase urban Palestine was targeted. Militias occupied Jaffa, Haifa and nine other mixed Arab-Jewish towns, expelling the Palestinian population. The second phase, beginning in May 1948, focussed more on rural areas. Aerial bombardment and heavy shelling of civilian areas combined with the destruction of hundreds of villages by the Zionists led to further deaths and ethnic cleansing.

Most notorious among the atrocities was the April 1948 massacre of 120 inhabitants of Deir Yassin by the Stern Gang. Such events served notice on Palestinian villagers thinking of resistance, many of whom fled in terror at the advance of the militias.

Ilan Pappe recounts events in Tantura, an old Palestinian village, “On the night of 22 May, the village was attacked from four sides . . . The captives were moved to the beach. There, the men were separated from the women and children, who were expelled to nearby Fureidis (Some families were reunited eighteen months later). Two hundred men between the ages of 13 and 30 were massacred by the Alexandroni and other Jewish forces. . . . There were similar incidents in many other locations, the details of which still await the research of future scholars.” (A Modern History of Palestine)

More than 531 Palestinian villages (out of 1000) were destroyed, depopulated and taken over. Some three quarters of a million Palestinians became refugees - 90% of those who had been living on what was designated as the Jewish state.

In December 1948 the new Israeli government retrospectively legalised land seizures and forbade victims from claiming any compensation. And the “Law of the Lands of Israel” stated that lands acquired by Zionist purchase would be leased in perpetuity on the condition that such lands would only be given to Jews. On this basis Israel’s remaining Arab citizens and their descendants were denied access to 95% of its land.

Zionist war success was such that by its end Israel had blatantly flouted even the UN partition plan by seizing 78% of Palestinian territory. What had been a Jewish minority of one third had driven out the majority and occupied over three quarters of the territory.

Nonetheless in May 1949 the UN General Assembly approved Israel’s membership of the UN, resolving that “Israel is a peace-loving state which accepts the obligations contained in the Charter and is able and willing to carry out those obligations”.

Since then, a state backed settlement expansion programme on top of the 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has left Palestinians with a miserable 8% of the former Palestinian territories. This territory is supposed to comprise the Palestinian side of the “two-state solution” currently hawked by Israel and the West.

Sixty years on, almost 75% of the Palestinian people are displaced - three quarters in forced exile and one quarter in the West Bank and Gaza. The 4.2 million dispersed across the Middle East and other parts of the world are the world’s largest and longest standing unresolved refugee case.

The Arab minority within Israel is subject to a regime of legal, political, social, economic and cultural state racism. And hundreds of thousands of Bedouins have been expelled from the Negev and other parts of the country adding to the displaced refugee population.

What’s left of the Palestinian population has been crushed into poverty stricken Bantustans surrounded by the Israeli army, laced with roads reserved for Zionist settlers, peppered with hundreds of settlements that take the water and best land and carved up by the “apartheid wall”.

The drive to contain resistance has involved killing tens of thousands with many more being detained, often without charge. In 2006, the Palestinians elected a Hamas government that sought to resist this set up - its MPs and ministers were jailed. The main Hamas stronghold, in Gaza, has been subject to two years of military assaults and economic blockade, leaving its 1.4 million inhabitants on the verge of famine.

Far from confronting these strategies, the USA and Britain have used them as a model for the occupation of Iraq. And Britain’s political establishment has celebrated the sixtieth anniversary. But this is nothing new.

In the McMahon-Hussein correspondence in 1915-6, a senior British diplomat promised British support for Arab independence in exchange for support for the allied war effort to bring down the Ottoman regime.

The USA, under Woodrow Wilson, announced a doctrine of self determination for the post World War I order. This was endorsed by the Anglo-French Declaration of 1918 whose goals included “the complete and final liberation of the peoples who have for so long been oppressed by the Turks and the setting up of national governments and administrations deriving their authority from free exercise of the initiative and choice of the indigenous populations”.

In 1919 the Covenant of the League of Nations enshrined the doctrine of self determination. The establishment of the “mandate” system under which Britain ruled Palestine was then presented merely as a temporary stepping stone to independent statehood in the 1920 Treaty of Sevres between the Allied Powers and Turkey.

But these commitments were duplicitous. In 1916 the Sykes-Picot Agreement, secretly signed between Britain and France, had divided the Ottoman Empire between the two states, with Palestine reserved for British control. And in 1917 Britain endorsed the Balfour Declaration - a letter from the Foreign Secretary to the British Zionist Federation granting recognition of and support for a Jewish “national home” in Palestine.

The British encouraged Zionist colonisation and suppressed a series of Palestinian uprisings, including the “Great Revolt” of 1936-9 in co-operation with Zionist militias. The first phase of the Nakhba occurred whilst Britain had responsibility for security and its officials looked on.

So what is the balance sheet of the Israeli state sixty years on? An out-runner for neoliberal capitalism, Israel has the biggest gap between rich and poor in the industrialised world. 1.25 million people, 40% of them working, are below the poverty line.

It has created an environmental disaster story, particularly in the Occupied Palestinian Territories - with water levels plummeting, toxic waste abounding, fields and olive trees destroyed.

And rampant racism against the so-called “Oriental” Jews - the backbone of the Israeli working class - has exposed the fallacy behind claims of a “home for the Jewish people”.

Israel’s much vaunted image of military prowess has been undermined. The spectacular failure of the Lebanon invasion in 2006 has been followed by the current resurgence of Hezbollah and the failure to crush Hamas.

Seemingly endless wars and invasions have sparked mass internal opposition. Whilst this is mainly tied to support for the Zionist state, it has brought to the surface decades of division over the nature of the project and how it relates to those it oppresses and expropriates.

Thousands of young people have become “Refusniks” - conscripts refusing to take part in the oppression of the Palestinians. Over 280 have been court-martialled and jailed for up to 35 days.

One consequence has been a substantial emigration of Jews. As of mid 2004 760,000 Israeli Jews were living abroad. An increase of 40% since 2000.

A primary factor in this crisis has been the unrelenting opposition of the Palestinian people. A resistance largely based on grass roots activism and in spite of a bloated, corrupt leadership; betrayal by the reactionary Arab states and disunity fomented by the imperialist states.

In the circumstances, it is unlikely Israel would be contemplating a 60^th anniversary but for its complete dependence on the imperialism whose regional interests it serves. Since the 1950s 18% of Israel’s GDP has derived from individuals, organisations and states abroad (chiefly the USA). Official figures valuing US aid since 1973 at $100 billion (a third of its foreign aid budget) are reckoned to be as little as a sixteenth of the true figure.

This financial, military and political underpinning and the historic responsibility of the USA, Britain and the EU in their support for Israel needs to be exposed and opposed. On its foundations is built the “legality” of the 1948 state - through their domination of UN and other international institutions. A far more difficult task than that of opposing apartheid, 1948 teaches us that the ruling ideology of the imperialist age and its state backers have to be confronted, not simply its reactionary outposts.

If you want any of these books, please make out a cheque to Socialist Resistance, and post it to: PO Box 1109 London N4 2UU, with details of your request, including your return address and a phone number.

1) Carre Rouge magazine, No. 2 6€/£5

2) Ecole Emancipe magazine, mai 2008 3€/£2.50

3) Revolution - Olivier Besancenot, 250p, 5,60€/£4.50p

4) Evo Morales et la gauche au pouvoir en Bolivie – Herve Do Alto & Pablo Stefanoni, 120p, 6€/£5

5) 1968 Fins et suites - Krivine et Bensaid, 190p, 12€/£9.50p

6) Mai 68 - Boris Gobille, 120p, 8,50€/£7

7) Les Trotskysmes - Bensaid, 125p, 8€/£6.50p

8} Che Guevara – Lowy et Besancenot, 245p, 14€/£11

9) Slogans et affiches de Mai 68, 230p, 7€/£5.60p

10) Un pur capitalisme - Michel Husson, 250p, 16€/£12.50p

11) Contretemps no. 22 – 1968 un monde en revolte, 190p, 19€/£15

12) Critique Communiste no. 185 – Municipales 12€/£9.50p

13) Critique Communiste no. 186 - Mai 68 -12€/£9.50p

14) La pensee de Trotsky – Mandel, 170p 7€£5.50p

15) Pamphlets at 2€/£1.60p on :

• a) Education
• b) Prostitution
• c) National Front
• d) Local elections 2008 Manifesto
• e) Electricity privatisation

16) Cahiers de Critique Communiste at 7€/£5.60

• a) Marx et l’appropriation sociale
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• d) Travail, critique du travail, emancipation
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• f) Classe ouvrière, salariat, lutte de classes

17) La France des annees 1968, 900p 30€/£24

18) DVDs 6€/£4.80p

• a) Pierre Frank on The popular front 1936
• b) Jean-Marie Vincent on the German revolution 1918-1923

Norman Traub

Africa has the lowest per capita fossil energy use of any major world region. Yet the continent is suffering considerably as a result of climate change caused by global warming and is the least equipped to deal with the crisis because of the poverty of its people.

The ice cap is receding on Africa’s highest peak, Mount Kilimanjaro. Desertification is spreading in the north western Sahel region. Droughts, flooding and other extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and severe. Numerous plant and animal species are in decline. Tropical diseases like malaria are spreading. The ecological problems that the capitalist countries of Africa face are aggravated by the deliberate policy of pollution export practised by the advanced capitalist countries.

Africa’s history, from its devastation by the slave trade from the 16th to the 19th centuries, its colonisation and subjection to imperialism, is intimately tied up with the development of capitalism. Political economist Patrick Bond at the beginning of his book Looting Africa (1) summarises the reasons for poverty in Africa. “Africa is poor, ultimately, because its economy and society have been ravaged by international capital as well as by local elites who are often propped up by foreign powers. The public and private sectors have worked together to drain the continent of resources which otherwise-if harnessed and shared fairly- should meet the needs of the peoples of Africa.”

The impoverishment of Africa is compounded by the damage to the ecology of the continent caused by climate change as well as the pollution exported there by the rich capitalist countries.

In November 2004 a coalition of 18 aid agencies and green organisations including Oxfam and Greenpeace reported that global warming was now the most serious problem facing the poor of the earth. Unless it was checked, the coalition argued, it threatened any progress they might make. The report called upon the rich capitalist countries, which have produced, and continue to produce, most of the greenhouse gas emissions, to cut them drastically.

Climate change has been called an act of aggression by the rich against the poor and this is borne out repeatedly as disastrous floods and droughts kill thousands of people in the capitalist countries of Sub Saharan Africa and Asia.

The coalition’s report went on to point out that Africa is uniquely vulnerable to climate shifts with 70% of its people being immediately dependent on rain-fed, small scale agriculture. It said that 14 African countries were already subject to water stress and that they would be joined by a further 11 nations in the next 25 years.

Rainfall is predicted to decline in the Horn of Africa and some parts of the south of the continent by as much as 10% by 2050, while the land may warm by as much as 1.6C. The crop harvests for hundreds of millions of people are likely to be affected. The sea level around the coast of Africa is projected to rise by 25cm by 2050 and both the west and east coast are likely to suffer from erosion. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts that Africa will suffer more than the rest of the world from global warming.

In the face of the foreseeable affects of climate change and with 850 million people living on less than $1 a day, how can Africa raise living standards and grow enough food to feed its hungry people? Millions of poor farmers and peasants in Africa are barely able to subsist on the land or are made landless and swell the huge slums and shanty towns in the big cities.

The problems that they face have to be seen within an international framework In the 1970s and 1980s African countries were caught in the debt trap. Debt has become a new permanent mechanism for the transfer of wealth from the peripheral capitalist countries to the capitalist classes in the metropolitan countries and the local elites of the South.

During the 1980s and 1990s Africa repaid US$255 billion of foreign credit, a factor of four times the original 1980 debt. Yet between 1980 and 2002 Sub Saharan Africa’s total foreign debt rose from $61 billion to $206 billion.

There is a world wide demand for cancellation of the debts of peripheral capitalist countries, which in any case are unrepayable. Tied to the loans offered by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) to the African countries were onerous conditions embodied in structural adjustment programmes. These obliged governments to liberalise trade, reduce tariffs and among other measures, dismantle domestic support for farmers.

To ensure repayment of the debt, the international financial institutions encouraged Africa to export its natural resources, which accounted for 80% of African exports in 2000. A dozen African countries were dependent on a single commodity for exports. The long term decline in prices for primary products such as coffee, tea and cotton, upon which the export of many African countries depend, is extremely damaging to their economies.

The World Bank in a report in 2005, considering the depletion of natural resources - petroleum, other subsoil mineral assets, timber, cropland and pastureland - associated with trade, had to admit that Africa is much poorer than it would have been if it had not concentrated on export of primary products.

While the IMF and World Bank demand that state support for farmers in Africa is removed, no such bans on aid apply to the farmers in the advanced capitalist countries, who receive massive agricultural subsidies. The US, European and Japanese agricultural industry are thus able to dump grains and foodstuffs in African markets.

It is not only the depletion of natural resources but pollution damage sustained in the extraction of primary products that is contributing to the impoverishment of Africa. A decade ago when Larry Summers (later the Clinton Administration’s treasury secretary) was the World Bank’s chief economist he publicly advocated the export of pollution to Africa. He said ‘I’ve always thought that under populated countries in Africa are vastly under-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low…I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that’.

As countless examples of the dumping of toxic waste in African countries show, this pollution policy is still being pursued today. In 2007 a Dutch company with revenues of US$ 28 billion dumped 500 tons of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, West Africa because it did not want to pay the $250,000 disposal fee in the Netherlands. At least 10 people died from the fumes, 69 were hospitalised and more than 40,000 people needed medical attention. Earlier this year a container with toxic cargo was dumped at the roadside near Mombassa, Kenya after it had been offloaded at the port. Two Mombassa residents suffered serious injuries and several others were treated for pulmonary ailments.

In their unending quest for fossil fuels for energy and for raw materials, the multinational companies will go to any lengths, including seriously damaging the ecology. One of the most notorious examples is the damage to the Niger Delta in Nigeria where the multinational oil companies, in particular Shell, have their operations.

In a report to the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, the people of the Niger Delta said “Apart from air pollution from the oil industry’s emissions… we have widespread water, soil and land pollution.” The pollution of the land and water has since made farming and fishing in large areas of the Niger Delta impossible. With no means of livelihood whole communities have become destitute.

If multinational capital in Africa is to be replaced by policies beneficial to the continent’s communities and ecology, poor farmers and urban workers will have to unite against imperialist exploitation and ally themselves with radical forces internationally which share their objectives.

Some of these forces, in the burgeoning movement of ecosocialism, have come up with the idea of an ecosocialist manifesto, a work still in progress (2). The manifesto states: ‘the generalisation of ecological production under socialist conditions can provide the ground for the overcoming of the present crises. A society of freely associated producers does not stop at its own democratisation. It must, rather, insist on the freeing of all beings as its ground and goal. It overcomes thereby the imperialist impulse both subjectively and objectively. In realising such a goal, it struggles to overcome all forms of domination, including, especially those of gender and race…Ecosocialism will be international, and universal, or it will be nothing. The crises of our time can and must be seen as revolutionary opportunities, which it is our obligation to affirm and bring into existence’.

(1) Looting Africa: the economics of exploitation by Patrick Bond. Published by Zed Books 2006.

(2) Ecosocialism or Barbarism p119. Published by Socialist Resistance Books 2007.

(Separate box or editorial?)

Capitalism cannot solve the ecological crisis

That climate change is due to human activity is no longer seriously disputed. The view of the world scientists as embodied in the 4^th assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) backed this conclusion.

The source of the ecological breakdown we are facing is capitalism and in particular its deadlier neoliberal phase occurring in the last thirty years. Humans have increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by more than a third since the industrial revolution and the rate of increase is becoming more rapid. Capitalism, based as it is on providing profits for the owners of capital and not for human need, devotes large parts of the production process to turning out socially useless and often harmful products which pollute the atmosphere and destabilise ecosystems.

Capitalism cannot solve the ecological crisis because to do so would set limits to its insatiable drive for profits. It has become increasingly recognised worldwide that the only way to stop ecological destruction is the socialist transformation of society in an ecological framework. This is advocated by ecosocialist who recognise the need for ‘limits on growth’ of production imposed for sustaining the environment. This goes hand in hand with the transformation of needs for use value rather than exchange value.

Alain Krivine and Olivier Besancenot on 1968

John Mc Anulty on 1968

This is the text of the Socialist Resistance leaflet for Tuesday’s demonstrations.

You can download the PDF here.

By taking part in these actions to defend women’s abortion rights, women and men are making it clear that we want our representatives in parliament to support the right of women to control their own bodies.

Without the right to control our fertility, women can take only limited steps to control the rest of our lives. That’s why the battle for abortion rights is so central to the fight for women’s liberation.

86 per cent of the public support a woman’s right to choose – will MPs show how good they are at listening by supporting this right by voting against any further restriction in the time limits? If they don’t, we need to make it clear that there will be a massive campaign throughout the labour movement to reverse such a reactionary decision.

Even if we are successful in defending the existing law over the next couple of days, there is plenty more to do.

Socialist Resistance supports strengthening the existing law – for example by getting rid of the need to have the permission of two doctors to decide what to do with our own bodies.

Build the campaign

Abortion Rights has played an important role over the last six months in particular bringing together trade unionists, students, feminists and other activists to defend abortion rights. But the campaign remains but weaker than its predecessor the National Abortion Campaign.

That weakness is partly as a result of the defeats the labour movement as a whole has suffered over the last twenty years, partly because abortion itself hasn’t been frontally under attack on so many occasions and partly because there has been in an overall rollback of feminist ideas.

Socialist feminists in particular have a responsibility to get involved in Abortion Rights and to make sure the issue of women’s abortion rights is taken up increasingly strongly in their workplaces and trade unions

For further information www.abortionrights.org

Voices for the working class in the 21st century

A day of discussion and debate on building broad left parties across Europe.
June 28th 2008

10.30 – 18.00

ULU Malet St London (nearest tube Goodge St)

Speakers from Die Linke in Germany, the Left Block in Portugal, the LCR in France, the Dutch Socialist Party and Sinistra Critica from Italy. From Britain, speakers from Respect, the Green left and the CPB.
Tickets £10 waged £5 unwaged (£2 students)

Cheques payable to Socialist Resistance, PO Box 1109 London N4 2UU

Socialist Resistance – Join us!

Socialist Resistance is a group of people who are convinced that capitalism is a system that offers most of humanity a future of war, environmental catastrophe and poverty.
We are Marxists because we can see that human society is divided into conflicting social classes. We take the side of the working class, the poor and the oppressed in Britain and internationally. Our political activity has the aim of putting society under the democratic political and economic control of working class people. They are the majority of the population.

Supporters of Socialist Resistance argue that the Labour Party has become so right-wing that, even though millions of workers still support it, the big job for socialists in Britain is to help create a new anti-capitalist party that supports workers’ and students’ struggles, defends asylum seekers, women’s rights and opposes imperialist wars. We are working hard to make sure that Respect Renewal is a success because we think that it is an important step along this road.

Socialist Resistance members are active in their workplaces and trade unions fighting to defend and extend workers’ jobs and conditions through mass action. We are also active in trying to building fighting democratic broad lefts within our unions.
Socialist Resistance stands in opposition to racism

Women’s abortion rights under attack

Emergency protest— as MPs vote on women’s abortion rights

Tuesday 20 May, 5.30pm

Old Palace Yard, outside Parliament — opposite St. Stephen’s Entrance

Tube: Westminster

Defend 24 Weeks
No reduction in abortion time limit

On Tuesday 20 May, members of parliament will debate and vote on the anti-abortion amendments to the Human Embryology and Fertilisation Bill. The key amendments aim to lower the time limit for abortion. This vote is taking place much earlier than expected and with very little notice. In the limited time available, it is vital that everyone who supports a woman’s right to choose does everything they can to show their opposition to any reduction in the time limit. Please attend this crucial protest — and encourage your trade union, women’s group, student union or other organisation to send a presence.

If you can’t get to London - find out if Abortion rights is doing
anything in your area before or on the day of the lobby and get
involved.

We say: women must come first

There is no significant scientific or medical support for any
reduction in the time limit. Yet a handful of anti-abortionists are
using downright propaganda and misinformation, hoping to intimidate and mislead MPs into attacking women’s rights. An overwhelming majority of the public supports the right to choose: MPs should uphold choice and vote down amendments by Nadine Dorries and any anti-abortion MPs.

Less than two per cent of abortions take place after 20 weeks. If
successful, a lowering of the abortion time limit would be devastating for a small number of women in difficult, unforeseeable and individual circumstances and would encourage further anti-abortion attacks.

Contrary to anti-abortion hype, research shows there has been no
increase in survival rates for births under 24 weeks. There is
opposition to any lowering of the time limit from the British Medical
Association, Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, British Association of Perinatal Medicine, Royal College of Nursing, TUC and national trade unions, the Department of Health and MPs across all three major parliamentary political parties.

If you haven’t already, now is the time to write to, email, phone or visit your MP in advance of the vote on 20th May to urge them to vote against any amendment to lower the abortion
time limit. It is also important to urge them to be in the House of
Commons (unless they are not on the side of a woman’s right to choose) because May 20th will be a free vote so the main political parties will not demand people are there.
A model letter and information on how to identify and contact your MP is available on the campaign website

www.abortionrights.org.uk.

If you are not already a member of Abortion Rights then please
sign up now - go to www.abortionrights.org.uk.