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 4th 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.
Posted by admin as Africa, Ecosocialism & climate, International at 7:47 PM MDT
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The Colombia Solidarity Campaign is asking supporters and trade unionists to act in defence of Colombian miners facing death threats.
We reprint Amnesty International’s Urgent Action below and encourage you to act on it immediately.
The small miners’ federation FEDEAGROMISBOL has been targeted with death threats. Its president Teófilo Manuel Acuña Ribón was one of the recipients. Teófilo has been in the UK this week in a visit organised by the Colombia Solidarity Campaign.
Teófilo’s visit has coincided with the AGM of the mining corporation Anglo American in London. A short statement was read out on Teófilo’s behalf to the shareholders, explaining the grave human rights situation in his home region of Sur de Bolivar.
Anglo American are 17% shareholders in AngloGold Ashanti, whose presence in this region is rejected by the Federation. Teófilo’s work, in exposing the negative impacts of British mining activity, has put him in great danger. He is seeking protection measures for when he returns in the coming days and the solidarity he receives this week could prove critical.
Colombia Solidarity Campaign
19 April
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Fear for safety/ Death threats
COLOMBIA
Members of the Magdelena Medio Peace and Development Programme ‘Programa de Desarrollo y Paz del Magdalena Medio’ Members of the human rights organization, Corporación SEMBRAR
Members of the trade union organization, The Agro- mining Federation of the South of Bolívar department, FEDEAGROMISBOL (La Federación Agrominera del Sur de Bolívar) Catholic priests working in the municipalities of Tiquisio, Arenal and Regidor, department of Bolívar.
On 10 April, an e-mailed death threat signed by the paramilitary group ‘Black Eagles’ (Aguilas Negras) was received by those mentioned above. They were informed that they were considered to be military targets and so would be killed.
The death threat stated that their names are on a list of undesirables who must be eliminated, “su nombre esta (sic.) en la lista de personas no deseadas …que deben ser eliminados”. It accuses those under threat of being guerrilla auxiliaries or guerrilla members and informs them that the aforementioned organizations and their members have been kept under surveillance in the municipalities of Tiquisio, Arenal, La Gloria and Regidor in the department of Bolívar as well as in Aguachica in the department of Cesar.
The e-mail continues by saying “Going down the list, you will be killed one by one for each criminal act that you organize against the ‘democratic security’ in these towns”, (Por cada acto delincuencial en contra de la seguridad democratica (sic.) que ustedes organicen dentro de estos pueblos, serán exterminados uno a uno por orden de lista). It concludes by saying “We won’t hesitate to kill you; start getting your loved ones ready so that they can bury you, (No vamos en vacilar en asesinarlos y vallan preparando a sus allegados para que empiecen a enterrarlos).
BACKGROUND INFORMATION
The ‘Programa de Desarrollo y Paz del Magdalena Medio’ promotes economic, social, cultural and institutional development in the region, focusing on vulnerable and displaced communities. Corporación SEMBRAR is a human rights organization which in recent years has been monitoring the human rights situation in the region and which has repeatedly denounced human rights abuses.
FEDEAGROMISBOL is an organization which represents peasant farmers and the interests of artisanal gold miners in the South of Bolívar department. It has campaigned against the arrival of multinational gold mining companies in the area and in recent years, its members have regularly been threatened and labelled as subversive. On 19 September 2006, Alejandro Uribe, a FEDEAGROMISBOL leader was killed by members of the Batallón Nueva Granada of the Colombian army. He was presented by the security forces as a guerrilla killed in combat.
Human rights organizations, trade unions and other social organizations have often been labelled as guerrilla collaborators or supporters by government officials, as well as by the security forces and paramilitaries. Such accusations have often been followed by threats or attacks against human rights activists. The conflict provides a useful cover for those seeking to expand and protect economic interests and human rights violations are often committed in areas of economic interest.
RECOMMENDED ACTION: Please send appeals to arrive as quickly as possible, in Spanish or your own language:
-expressing concern for the safety of members of FEDEAGROMISBOL, SEMBRAR, the ‘Programa de Desarrollo y Paz del Magdalena Medio’ and Catholic priests working in the municipalities of Tiquisio, Arenal and Regidor in the department of Bolivar.
-urging the authorities to ensure that all measures deemed appropriate by the individuals and organizations named in the threat received on 10 April, are taken to guarantee their safety;
-calling for full and impartial investigations into the death threat received on 10 April, the results of which should be made public and those responsible brought to justice;
-calling for decisive action to confront and dismantle paramilitary groups and investigate and break their links with the security forces, in line with repeated UN recommendations;
- calling on the authorities to produce policy and plans, in conjunction with human rights defenders, to guarantee their safety according to the principles of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights and Responsibilities of Individuals, Groups and Institutions to Promote and Protect Universally Recognized Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, and to make these plans public.
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Colombia Solidarity Campaign adds
Example message in Spanish:
Estimado Autoridad,
Escribo expresar mi preoccupación por la seguridad de los miembros de las organizaciones SEMBRAR, FEDEAGROMISBOL y la Programa de Desarrollo y Paz Magdelena Medio y los sacerdotes que estan trabajando en los municipios de Tiquisio, Arenal y Regidor en el departamento de Bolivar.
Solicito que se tomen medidas a guarantizar la seguridad de ellos que recibieron las amenazas del 10 Abril.
Llamo por una investigación completa y imparcial a las amenazas y que los resultados sean disponible publicamente y los que tengan responsibilidad sean castigado.
Por favor tome accion a confrontar a los grupos paramilitares y investique sus conneciones y sus vinculos con las fuerzas de seguridad - en acuerdo con recommendaciones hecho por las Naciones Unidas repetidamente.
También le solicito a producir planes y políticas, conjunto con defensores de DDHH a guarantizar su seguridad en acuerdo con los principios de la Declaracion de las Naciones Unidos en los Derechos y Responsibildades de Individuos, Grupos y Instituciones a Promover y Proteger los Derechos Humanos y Libertades Fundamentales Reconocidos Universalmente, y que sean públicos.
Sinceramente
Please send by E-MAIL to:
The Colombian Embassy in UK Email: mail@colombianembassy.co.uk for attention of Mr A. Garcia.
Posted by admin as Colombia, Trade unions at 7:34 PM MDT
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From Naftana, the UK support committee for the Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions
In a series of telephone calls from Basra over the past 48 hours, Iraqi trade union activists appeal for solidarity and describe how the so-called ‘Security Plan’ started midnight 24 March with intense shelling and fire from all kind of weapons.
The attacking forces now besieging Basra stretched all the way to the city from Dhi Qar province. Two armoured divisions are deployed, in addition to thousands of policemen, backed by US and British planning and air cover. They have cut off electricity supplies, food and water on the city of 1.5 million people. Hundreds have been killed or injured in a savage, premeditated and unprovoked attack, now spreading to much of Iraq as the people protest and show solidarity with Basra’s beleaguered people.
They describe the attack as far worse than the invasion of 2003 and begun in the same barbaric manner that the criminal Saddam employed against Basra to crush the March 1991 people’s uprising. They remind us that the present puppet Iraqi government sentenced Saddam’s Defence Minister to death few months ago for similar crimes of waging war on civilians. The assault is backed by the US and British occupation forces, particularly in providing air cover. US planes are also bombarding areas in the Basra, several southern cities and Baghdad, where tens of thousands marched yesterday denouncing the “puppet regime”. It is now, along with many other cities, under a strict curfew enforced by regime and occupation forces.
Trade union leaders have asked us to inform the public in Britain that the government’s attack on Basra serves the occupation. The city is “steadfast” and the onslaught will end in “utter failure.” The city streets were free of the occupying forces before the assault and the regime’s attacks will make it even more dependent on the occupation forces, they stressed.
Naftana, the UK support committee for the Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions in the struggle for democratic trade unionism in Iraq, condemns British collusion in the preparation of the assault on Basra city and British participation in air strikes.
Naftana urges all to join in calling for an immediate withdrawal of British forces from Iraq, ending the US-led occupation, and the payment of reparations to Iraq.
In the absence of adequate media coverage of the nature and context of this savage onslaught, Naftana wants to set the record straight on UK involvement.
In December 2007, the Basra Development Commission (BDC) was formally announced after discussions between Gordon Browne and Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih. Browne appointed a British businessman, Michael Wareing, Chief Executive of KPMG International as “Commissioner”, apparently heading the BDC. Wareing visited Basra in February and made outrageous comments, confirming his real interests to be those of predatory business rather than the security, development and well-being of Basra and its people.
Wareing told The Observer: “If you look at many other economies in the world, particularly the oil-rich economies, many of these places are quite challenging countries in which to do business. … Frankly, if you can successfully operate in the Niger Delta, that is a very different benchmark from imagining that Basra needs to be like London or Paris.”
Wareing’s appointment was welcomed by Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih, a major advocate of the 2003 invasion and of privatisation. On March 13 the British Defence Minister Des Browne met with Salih in Basra Airport. Browne promised to show new action on ‘security’ in Basra province and to bring Umm Qasr port up to ‘the highest international standards’. What this meant was made clear by Salih who threatened the Governor, people of Basra and port workers’ union of Umm Qasr saying ‘there must be a very strong military presence in Basra to eradicate these militias’.
What Salih, himself a former militia leader, was concerned about were organised port workers who had earlier confronted the American SSA Marine corporation in Umm Qasr and the Danish Maersk corporation in Khor az-Zubair in the two years after these companies were imposed by the occupying forces in 2003. The new plans involve privatisation measures opposed by the port workers, who are supported by other trade unions and port management. It is likely that the planned corporate takeover of the port is required in order to facilitate the activities of international oil companies.
Nevertheless, the scale of what was afoot was not apparent, but the link between military action and breaking trade unionism was. On March 17-18 the US Vice-President Dick Cheney was in Baghdad meeting with the Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki who presently heads the attack on Basra city. Top of the agenda was the oil law and how to insure its passage. The oil law means that international oil majors will control Iraqi oil for many decades.
Various reports reveal that the present carnage was coordinated and agreed with British and American leaders. Naftana believes they commanded it. Why? The tide of national public opinion has turned against long-term troop deployment in both the UK and the USA. If the war was fought for oil and total domination of Iraq, then those most closely associated to those interests must speed up their plans. The present onslaught aims to break popular resistance, especially from the Sadrist movement, to the passage of the oil law and to the occupation itself. Beyond that, with local elections looming next autumn, it aims to destroy morally and physically the popular base which would otherwise be set to drive, first from local power, and subsequently from national power, the US/UK allies, Nouri al-Maliki (al-Dawa party), his main allies in the Supreme Islamic Council, led by Abdulaziz al-Hakim, and the Kurdish leaders, Talbani and Barzani.
Naftana calls on all who support democratic trade unionism to stand by the people of Iraq, with the port workers of Umm Qasr and the oil workers of Southern Iraq, with workers in Baghdad and many other cities who are in danger of physical elimination.
For further information on Naftana and IFOU: Sabah Jawad – 07985 336886 sabah.jawad@googlemail.com
Posted by admin as War and imperialism at 6:36 PM MDT
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François Sabado: from International Viewpoint
Some elements of the international situation…
The international situation confirms an extension and a deepening of capitalist globalization. It is marked by the continuation of the offensive of the ruling classes against the living conditions of hundreds of millions of human beings, of workers, by the systematization of the liberal counter-reforms, the increasingly larger place occupied by the “financialisation” of the world economy, by an ecological crisis which calls into question vital equilibriums of the planet.
1a) This globalization is designing a new configuration of the world market, where competition is sharpening between US imperialism, still dominant but weakened, the European powers, and the emergence of new powers like China and India, whose shares of the world’s GDP are increasing regularly. If the United States and Europe are experiencing low growth rates, from 2 to 3 per cent, China and India are experiencing growth rates from 8 to 10 per cent, and other raw material producer countries (of oil in particular) such as Russia or Venezuela, between 6 and 8 per cent. These socio-economic changes prefigure new relationships of forces and new international tensions.
1b) This has consequences in the field of international politics, where the interests of a weakened North-American bourgeoisie and those of European powers which want to maintain their rank in this new world competition, make them converge in new systems of alliances, in particular with regard to China and Russia. That does not exclude, far from it, the aggressive search for new market shares for each bourgeoisie, but the bonds between the United States and the European Union are tending to be reinforced. The new relations between Sarkozy’s France and Bush’s United States are a good example of this inflection or change. Chirac was against the war in Iraq. Sarkozy is for. He is even in the front line in the confrontation with Iran. But more generally the envisaged return of France to NATO and the integration of the European military force within the Alliance shows clearly the type of reorganization that is underway.
1c) This accentuation of international competition, combined with an increasingly strong tendency to the constitution of a world market of the labour force, is leading governments and the employing class to create the political and socio-economic conditions for an increase in the rates of profit, the lengthening of working hours and the time of exploitation, the containment and even the further compression of the share of wages in the production of wealth.
1d) These policies have, in particular, a series of consequences in capitalist Europe, where the principal European bourgeoisies, to ensure their place in world competition, are frontally attacking the “European social model”, attacking in fact, the systems of social security, the social rights of workers, public services. This policy is concentrated in the new “European treaty” which takes up again the broad outline of the project of a European Constitution that was rejected in 2005 by the people of France and the Netherlands. It is reinforced by the integration into Europe of the Eastern European countries. An integration which is leading to the dismantling of a series of social gains and which consequently, exert a downward pressure on all the living and working conditions of the popular classes of these countries.
1e) The United States is on the eve of new elections (at the end of 2008), which can lead to inflections or modifications of American policy. Nevertheless over the recent long period, US imperialism has confirmed its policy of strategic politico-military redeployment. It is a question for it, in a situation where the American economy is increasingly dependent on world credit, on shares, debentures and Treasury bonds held by powers like China or Japan, of compensating for a certain weakening by an aggressive military policy, of occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan, of confrontation with Iran, and to a lesser degrees with Russia and China. This policy also comprises a policy of “recolonisation” of certain countries, with the aim of maintaining and even extending control over natural resources or strategic raw materials s like oil
And some contradictions…
The capitalist system largely dominates all the economic and social activity of the planet. The cost of this domination is constantly increasing, on both the social and ecological levels. It is permanently nourishes the internal and external contradictions of the system which is leading to class struggles social struggles in the broad sense, which express the refusal by the popular classes of the neo-liberal and capitalist order. There is a series of examples of these contradictions of the system:
2a) The crisis of the financial and banking system of the United States, of which the crisis of the “subprimes” (loans with variable interest rates which are ruining millions of Americans and making bankrupt a series of banks and financial organizations engaged in lending) confirms the fragility of the current economic expansion. That proves the “ultra-sensitivity” of North-American capitalism to the financialisation of the world economy. This crisis of the international financial system reinforces the structural weaknesses of present-day capitalist development, in particular the weakness of productive investments, by “making more expensive” and hardening the rates and conditions of loans. This crisis of investment has its repercussions on the rates of productivity, and in the final analysis on the growth rates in two of the bastions of the world economy: the United States and Europe. The present financial crisis is now having direct effects on the slowdown in economic activity in the USA and on the risk of transformation of this crisis into an economic recession. All these factors weigh on the room for manoeuvre that the ruling classes and the governments in these countries have to manage economic and social relations and can lead to systemic crises.
2b) Over the last few years the ecological crisis has taken on new dimensions. The consequences of global warming are beginning and are likely to cause, in the long term, new catastrophes - ecological, social, and human. Despite all the political and media efforts of governments to make compatible the functioning of the capitalist system, the ever more frenetic search for profit and ecology, a new consciousness is emerging that “lives are worth more than capitalist profits” and than the cost of the functioning of the system is increasingly calling into question the vital equilibriums of the planet. Revolutionaries must take up this question, decisive for the years to come, in order to denounce the destructive effects of capitalism on ecological problems, and to stress the importance of an economy durably controlled and planned according to social needs and not capitalist profit.
2c) These contradictions are expressed in an acute way in the failure which US imperialism has encountered in Iraq. The term “New Vietnam” is usually adopted by the American media to speak about the situation of the American army in the region. It is a true political stagnation and soldier whom knows The Bush administration is really bogged down there, from both a political and military point of view. All the propaganda about the objectives of stabilization or democratization of the region is in tatters. It is a traditional operation of aggression and re-colonisation of a country and a region. The rejection of the US occupation combined with the resistance of the Palestinian people against the Israeli policy of aggression and colonization constitutes one of the major factors of destabilization of the international imperialist system.
2d) the socio-economic consequences of capitalist globalization and its armed dimension cause new tensions and social, political and military confrontations. Under the pressure of the demands of the financial markets, and the pressure of imperialism, in particular American imperialism, and in a situation of absence, retreat or even structural crisis of the traditional workers’ movement and of bourgeois nationalism, social reactions can take the form of organizations, currents, clans or ethnic or religious groups or whose orientation is globally reactionary. This is what is developing around the situations in Pakistan and in Afghanistan. It is also the case with the tendencies towards the breaking up of a series of states in Africa.
2e) The fact that the USA is bogged down in the Middle East has international consequences, and in particular in Latin America. It is not a question of underestimating the pressure which “the empire” always exerts on a continent that it continues to regard as its back-yard. But it is necessary to underline the weakening of its capacities of intervention on the continent. On the military level, it is difficult for it to intervene in Iraq, Afghanistan and to prepare interventions in Latin America. The “Colombia Plan” is there. So are the military bases in Paraguay. Aid to the “golpist” (putschist) or “liberal-authoritarian” Right is always present.
The Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA: in Spanish, ALCA) is a failure but bilateral treaties have been concluded between the United States and a series of countries of South America. In short, the United States does not ignore South America, but it is undeniable that there is a new relationship of forces between American imperialism and a series of countries of the Latin-American continent and not the least important ones, in particular two groups of countries. The first group consists of Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. Taking advantage of a phase economic development and of the ability of the governments in power - Lula in Brazil, Kirchner in Argentina, Tabaré Vázquez in Uruguay - to channel, to control, to integrate their mass movements or, more exactly, whole sections of the leaderships of these mass movements, in particular the leaderships of the Workers’ Party (PT) and the United Workers’ Confederation (CUT) in Brazil and of political and trade-union Peronism in Argentina (even if Lula is situated to the right of Kirchner), the ruling classes of these countries have conquered new margins of manoeuvre to negotiate and impose a series of economic objectives on American imperialism.
They are pursuing, on their own account and in their manner, neo-liberal policies, accompanying them with a dimension “social aid”, and with their insertion in the world market, in particular by their agro-exporting policies and their specific relations with the international financial system. The second group of countries, which are today imposing a new experience of partial rupture with American imperialism, is led by Venezuela, followed by Bolivia and Ecuador, all of them supported by Cuba. These countries, each one with its specificity, are trying today to loosen the vice-like grip of the debt, to take back ownership and control over their natural resources, to ensure social programmes for food, health and education, to restore their national sovereignty against American and European (particularly Spanish) pressures.
3. Offensive and counter-offensive in Venezuela and in Bolivia
The victory of the “no” in the referendum of December 2, 2007 represents a turn in the political situation in Venezuela. Few people expected the victory of the “no”. It is a defeat for Chávez, even though the Bolivarian process continues. And it is a defeat for the progressive forces in Venezuela and in Latin America. Let us make no mistake about it, it is not - as certain sectarian currents explain it - “a defeat for Chávez… but a victory for the popular forces”! The victory of the “no” directly serves the forces of the Right, “golpist” or moderate. It enables them to recover, to reorganize and prepare the coming battles under better conditions. The victory of the “no” weakens Chávez in his relationship with American imperialism and even with the governments in power in Argentina and Brazil. The pressure to “moderate” Chávez, to lead him to a policy of dangerous compromises will be stronger… That is why, without any reservations or hesitations, we came out for the “yes” in the referendum, over and above the appreciation we might have had of such and such an article of the Constitution.
But we have to go over the reasons which led to the victory of the “no”. Globally, we share the explanations which the comrades of “Marea clasista y socialista give” [1] How could Chávez lose more than 3 million voters – which is not nothing - compared to the last electoral consultation? There was certainly the outburst of the media against the government, the campaigns of lies, the calumnies, in short all the weapons of the Venezuelan Right, but the Chavez leadership bears its own responsibility. This failure comes from deeper causes than the simple episode of the Constitution. It is necessary today to have a great debate on the reasons for the “no”, a debate which will help to define a policy for the coming weeks and months. We had pointed out that the modalities and certain articles of the Constitution would reinforce the “Bonapartist aspect” of the Chávez regime and that a new constitution would not lead to socialism without tackling the problems of redistribution of wealth and property… But in fact more substantial phenomena explain a certain distance of part of the Bolivarian people from their president. First of all, problems related to the vital needs of the population: food, purchasing power, jobs, working conditions… The problems of supply of basic foodstuffs weighed considerably in the balance.
More generally, if the problems of food, health and education have seen considerable progress, their financing being ensured by the oil revenues - which is all to the credit of the Bolivarian regime -, the economic and social structures of the country did not experience fundamental change. The inequalities remain. Financial revenues have increased by more than 40 per cent. The structures of property have not been modified. Improving the standard of living of the great majority of the population – workers the informal sector, peasants, civil servants - is the first task in order to deepen the process. And if that involves incursions by the state into economic life, into companies, into the circuits of supply and trade, into control of the banking system in the service of the workers, into property and land redistribution, there should be no hesitation, even if it implies a confrontation with the bourgeoisie and sectors of the state apparatus, even pro-governmental sectors.
The second fundamental reason for the distance taken by part of the people, is the reality – noted by a number of observers - of a process of bureaucratization of a governmental sector which uses power for its own ends instead of serving the government. So, here and there, phenomena of corruption were denounced. In the same way, we saw developing a policy of confrontation with social movements and trade unions, in particular on the part of the Ministry of Labour. All that alienated from the government a series of sectors, which have not however broken with the Bolivarian revolution. Today, it is necessary renew contact with these sectors, to remobilise them in order to deepen the process. So the second task is to deepen the mobilization and the democratization of the Bolivarian process.
More power to the people, more power to the organisms of the revolution, the popular assemblies in the neighbourhoods, the rank and-file trade-union representatives elected in the workplaces, the communes. It is necessary to broaden the process of co-management of enterprises, to ensure a unitary and democratic congress of the trade-union movement, of the UNT. The social and democratic content of the revolution is all the more important in that, although the process will always be confronted with a “putschist sector “, it will also be attacked by more political manoeuvres. It will be necessary for it to not only answer ” the whip of the counter-revolution which makes the revolution advance” – a famous sentence of Trotsky’s that Chávez regularly quotes - but also with “advances” and “dishonest proposals” which will aim at devitalizing the revolutionary process, at marginalizing in order to finally destroy it… The situation is thus likely to become complicated.
Chávez is at a crossroads: either he yields to the pressures to moderate the process… and he will lose the support of important sectors of his social and political base, or he advances, joins again with the most combative sectors, satisfies the fundamental popular demands and the Bolivarian revolutionary process will deepen. And that will have repercussions in the whole of Latin America.
The crisis is also accelerating in Bolivia, where the vote adopting the new constitution defended by Evo Morales and the large majority of the population, workers, peasants, Indians, is not recognized by the Right and by the “rich white classes” concentrated in Santa Cruz and the provinces of the West, where four regions have just proclaimed their autonomy. The revolutionaries are with the MAS of Evo Morales for the application of this constitution and the satisfaction of the vital needs of the poorest populations in Bolivia.
But the key country is Venezuela. If there was a defeat of the Bolivarian process, that would have immediate repercussions in Bolivia and Ecuador, not to mention Cuba. A global deterioration of the relationship of forces would favour in Cuba the partisans of a “Chinese way” – a combination of the maintenance in power of the Cuban Communist Party and the development of capitalism. But we are still far from that, the decisive stage is the relaunching of the Bolivarian process combined with the deepening of the Bolivian and Ecuadorian experiences.
4. And Europe…
The European situation is at the centre of the acceleration of neo-liberal policies. One of the key objectives of the ruling classes on an international scale and in Europe - at the moment when the pressures of the world market are pushing more and more towards the unification of the labour market, towards dragging wages downwards, towards the gradual dismantling of systems of social security, towards liquidating public services - is to finish with the “European social model”. The steamroller of neo-liberal policies advances regularly. But it also regularly provokes social resistance. The working class, and beyond that the majority of the population in Europe, is east deeply attached to a series of social rights. In France the ideologues of the Sarkozy government have openly declared it: it is necessary to destroy the programme of the National Council of the Resistance (CNR) of 1945 and all the social conquests which have been obtained since. Sarkozy declares that “he wants to reform more than Margaret Thatcher”… he has scored a series of points, in particular by applying his counter-reform of pensions and of the special pension systems (for railway workers, employees in the electricity and gas industries…) but he has not yet beaten the workers’ movement did not beat yet. The feeling of workers, in particular after the rail strikes, is not one of defeat. There has not been a major defeat of the workers’ movement in Europe like the one suffered by British miners in the 1980s, important struggles and major confrontations are still ahead of us… but three remarks are necessary
The struggles are defensive. They do not manage to block, far less to reverse the course of the counter-reforms. They appear in the form of explosions or partial struggles. They can destabilize the regimes in place… but that does not stop the process of counter-reform.
These struggles are unequal in Europe, depending on the country. The level of class struggle remains rather high in France - people speak about “the French exception” in Europe - and also in Italy, where at the end of 1990s and the beginning of the 2000 decade, there was a combination of one-day general strikes by the trade-union movement and a strong global justice and anti-war movement. Recently, there was an important strike of rail workers in Germany, even though it is a strike which did not receive solidarity from other trade unions and a large part of the trade-union left. In Spain and in Portugal the level of class struggle remains very low. In the countries of Northern Europe, in spite of quite strong attacks, the situation is under control of the governments and the leaderships of the trade-union movement; the level of struggle is rather low.
In the countries, where there is a certain level of struggle, it is necessary to underline a contradictory situation: there is a real unevenness between the level of struggle and the level of consciousness. There can be partial struggles or explosions but there is no organic growth of a wave of class struggles – of the global level of struggle, an increase in trade-union membership, workers’ parties, or class struggle or revolutionary political currents - as there was at the end of the 1960 and in the 1970s in Europe, particularly in Southern Europe. As a result, the struggles have difficulty in finding a political expression in class struggle terms.
5. Two choices on the left!
In the current international conjuncture, the left, the workers’ movement, the social movements are confronted with two main orientations in the face of capitalist globalisation: an orientation of adaptation to liberal capitalism and a line - ours - of resistance, struggle, anti-capitalist combat. We have, in France, a formula to speak about this situation: “There are two lefts”, we say. Of course, there are in reality several varieties of “left”, but we are really confronted with two fundamental choices: to accept or to refuse this capitalist globalization!
5.a) The great majority of the traditional leaderships of the workers’ movement - social democracy, ex- or post-Stalinism, Greens - or in certain developing countries bourgeois nationalism, have chosen the road of adaptation. This is the result of a whole process of integration into the institutions of state and the capitalist system. But this process of integration, in the current period of capitalist globalisation, is leading to qualitative changes, to structural changes of all these political formations. The demands of capitalist globalization are such that the room for manoeuvre to build social compromises between ruling classes and reformist movements has been considerably reduced. The big economic groups, the financial markets, the higher echelons of the state are summoning the reformist leaderships to accept the framework dictated by the search for maximum profits, by an increased financialisation of the world economy.
As a result, social democracy is being transformed into social-liberalism. From a social democracy which, faced with the class struggle, exchanged its support for the capitalist order against social improvements, we have moved to socialist parties which became ” reformist parties without reforms” and have now got to the point of being “parties of liberal counter-reforms”. In Europe, the European Union provides the framework of collaboration between Christian democracy and social democracy, in order to deploy the counter-reforms on pensions and retirement and the liquidation of the systems of social security and the public services. That does not exclude a skilful combination of programmes of assistance to the poorest layers - a system of minimum incomes, the programme of the “Family Grant” in Brazil… - and counter-reforms which attack the hard core of working-class rights and social conquests.
But it is on the political level that these choices are most manifest: the evolution of European social democracy towards “a third way” between the Right and the Left, in the call - now in Italy and France - to transform the historical socialist parties into democratic parties on the American model… This is also what we saw in Brazil, where the Workers’ Party (PT) followed in only about fifteen years the evolution over almost a century of historical social democracy: from a class party, the PT was transformed into a social-liberal party. Once again, this evolution does not exclude policies of social assistance, which provide a social base for these parties among certain sectors of the population. This is the case of Lula, in Brazil, who remains popular with his programme of the “Family Grant”.
This social-liberal evolution represents a general tendency. In a series of country the process is not completed. The ruling classes need, moreover, in a political system of alternating governments, “to be able to choose between the Right and the Left”. So these social-liberal formations are not bourgeois parties like the others. There remain differences between the Right and the Left, especially in the way they are perceived by popular sectors, but overall social democracy and its allies are everywhere going through this process of integration into capitalist globalization and of a movement “towards the right”.
5.b) At the other pole of the left, there are the forces which refuse capitalist globalization, which resist and defend an anti-capitalist orientation. Then of course, there are forces which refuse ultra-liberalism, which reject its excessive or outrageous aspects, hoping for a capitalism with a human face. There is also, in Latin America, the return to “neo-developmental” projects - bourgeois nationalist projects which hope to loosen the grip of imperialist domination. But in general what is missing with these forces is the ability and the will to really break with the whole neo-liberal logic – a logic which is inextricable from that of the capitalist system - and especially the determination to take on the ruling classes in order to respond to popular aspirations. This generally leads political formations - such as the PT or Peronism, each in its own way - which in opposition can claim to be anti-liberal, to adapt to liberal capitalism once they come to power. And it is there that there lies, so far, the major difference between on the one hand Lula, Kirchner and Tabaré Vázquez and, on the other Chávez, Morales, and Corréa: The first have adopted the neo-liberal logic, accompanying it by “social programmes” for the poorest layers. They are loyal partners of the financial markets. The group of the last three, contrary to the first group, have not hesitated to clash with the ruling classes and American imperialism in order to apply their programme of reforms, even if these reforms remain partial. But to break in a consistent way with liberalism, it is necessary to break with capitalism.
6. For new anti-capitalist parties…
This is the programme of the parties and the political formations which we want to build. An anti-capitalist action or transitional programme which defends immediate demands (wages, jobs, services, distribution of land, control over natural resources…), democratic demands (problems of popular and national sovereignty in countries dominated by imperialism) and transitional demands, which lead to the need for another kind of distribution of wealth and to putting in question the capitalist ownership of the economy.
The implementation of these programmes requires governments at the service of the working class, basing themselves on the mobilization and the self-activity of the popular classes.
This battle - and it is a central battle today - implies the rejection of any participation in or support for social-liberal governments which conduct the business of the state and the capitalist economy. You paid dearly for it in Brazil with the participation of Socialist Democracy [2] in the Lula government, but you should know that your painful experience was useful to us and that we learned all the lessons from the Brazilian experience in order to reject in France, in Italy, in Portugal, in Spain any support for or participation in social-liberal governments.
So the question of participation or not in this type of government had again become a cardinal question of the strategy of power in Europe and in the principal countries of Latin America.
These are the references which constitute the basis of the anti-capitalist parties which are being built – like the Bloco de Esquerda (Left Bloc) in Portugal, which you have known for several years - or which will be built in the coming months and years in Europe, more precisely to France and Italy, each with its specificity. In a certain fashion, they are the equivalents of your PSOL.
In France, you know that the LCR obtained good results in the last presidential election, with nearly 1.5 million votes. But the LCR has above all a spokesperson, Olivier Besancenot, who is a young postal worker, and who regularly takes the side of workers who are involved in a struggle or a strike, particularly in the most recent rail strike. That has brought him, for several months now, great popularity. The political space occupied by Olivier, the wave of sympathy which he arouses, largely exceeds even that of the LCR.
That comes after a series from events over the last twelve years, where there took place social resistance, political experience against the liberal counter-reforms, of the debates on the type of political alternative, which have created the conditions for building a new party.
This party will be an anti-capitalist party, feminist, ecologist and internationalist party. It will situate its combat in the revolutionary traditions of the workers’ movement. At the centre of the project, there are key political references: the class struggle, unity of action of the workers and their organizations, independence with respect to the central institutions of the capitalist state, socialist democracy. So, although this new party has anti-capitalist programmatic and strategic delimitations in a perspective of the conquest of power by the workers, it will leave open a whole series of questions about the type of revolution of the 21st century, its forms and its content.
But anchored in the class struggle, it will subordinate its electoral and institutional positions to the development of social mobilizations and the self-activity of the mass movement. The objective of this new party is to bring together militants and currents coming from various origins - Communists, Socialists, trade unionists, libertarians, revolutionaries - on the basis of a programme which is the “common understanding of events and tasks” and not on the basis of general ideological or historical references. Nor is our objective to bring together only revolutionaries, it is to try to build a new political representation of workers and youth, even if it is only partial and only represents a first step in an overall reorganization of the workers’ movement. So, while we will maintain the links of the LCR with the Fourth International, this new party will not be a “Trotskyist” party. It will try to amalgamate, as we said above, the best of all the revolutionary traditions.
In Italy, starting from different histories and experiences, a whole sector of Communist Refoundation has just broken with this party in order to launch the construction of a new anti-capitalist party. After a whole political period where the leadership of Communist Refoundation had applied a policy of rejection of neo-liberalism and of engaging in and driving forward the global justice movement – an orientation that we supported -, this party today supports and takes part in the government of Prodi (former president of the very liberal European Union).
By taking part in the Prodi government, Communist Refoundation has supported all the programmes of neo-liberal austerity, a reform of pensions, and especially the sending of Italian troops alongside US troops in Afghanistan. Under these conditions, the comrades of the Fourth International, but also of other currents, left trade unionists, organizers of the social centres and the anti-war movement, decided to engage a process of constitution of a new anti-capitalist party… So it is on the basis of a fight against the Right and the Italian employers, but also in breaking with the social-liberalism which has taken over Communist Refoundation in Italy of Italy, that we are taking part in the construction of a new party, represented today by the Sinistra Critica (Critical Left.) movement.
To conclude: we began the discussion on new anti-capitalist parties at the beginning of the 1990s, taking into account the end of a whole historical period - the short century which started with the war of 1914-1918 and ended in the collapse of the USSR in 1991 - and the beginning of a new historical period marked by capitalist globalization, the social-liberal evolution of the workers’ movement, the final decline of Stalinism, and by new waves of social resistances.
Today, on the basis of social resistance and political experiences, in particular of social-liberal governments in power, the contours of new anti-capitalist formations are starting to be confirmed.
The PSOL, the Bloco de Esquerda, Sinistra Critica, the new anti-capitalist party in France, that is the horizon for the coming months and years. It is a major challenge for revolutionaries.
We will need a lot of audacity and tactical flexibility to build broad anti-capitalist parties, based on the combativeness of workers and youth, on the political lessons drawn from recent experiences where various orientations – going from social-liberalism to ant-capitalism – have been confronted. But it is also necessary to know the limits within which we will build these parties. Because there is great unevenness between the political space that we occupy and the politico-organisational reality of our forces. Whether it is in France (between the popularity of Olivier Besancenot and the reality of the LCR) or in Brazil (between the popularity of Heloísa Helena and the reality of the PSOL), there are real differences between the popularity of our spokespersons and our organizations.
Of course Heloísa and Olivier base themselves on real phenomena - of combativeness and consciousness - in society, but if they occupy such a political space it is as much, if not more, the result of the “movement towards the right” of the traditional Left (PS or PT) which leaves broad spaces on the left, than the expression of a movement of organic growth of a rise in the class struggle. They occupy a space left vacant by the “movement to the right” of the reformist apparatuses.
Furthermore, this space is not automatically occupied by anti-capitalist forces. Thus in Germany, it is a left reformist party - Die Linke – the product of the fusion of the ex-Stalinists of the PDS and a left wing of social democracy with Oscar Lafontaine, which occupies this space and which plans to take part in a social-liberal governmental coalition with the SPD and the Greens. Because we are not confronted with a high level of struggle, an increase trade-union membership, an increase in the membership of the left parties of left or the emergence of trade-union or political “class struggle” currents.
We want to build anti-capitalist parties, but hundreds of sympathisers and militants are only coming towards us because we are the left that fights, that does not let anything go, that is really on the left. They are not coming towards us on positions that are anti-capitalist, and even less revolutionary. It is a new situation and it is necessary, of course, to take this phenomenon as something positive. But in a context where the level of activity of the masses is not at its highest, the electoral pressures, the pressure from the media, and in certain situations, the institutional pressures can be very strong. That must encourage us to stress what must be the centre of gravity of the parties that we want to build, that is the class struggle and their anti-capitalist and revolutionary character: by involvement in the ongoing struggles of the workers, by links with the social movements, by striking a balance between our electoral work and the decisive place of our social intervention, by the control of our elected representatives, by the political education of our members.
Once again, it is an enormous challenge for revolutionaries but it is the best way of answering the new historical period than we are living in…
François Sabado is a member of the Political Bureau of the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR, French section of the Fourth International), and of the Executive Bureau of the Fourth International.
NOTES
[1] Marea Clasista y Socialista is a regroupment of militants of the revolutionary left, including trade-union leaders of the UNT and militants who, having begun building the Revolution and Socialism Party, decided to join the Unified Socialist Party launched on the initiative of Chávez. For their point of view, see “Lack of organization of honest and consistent sectors which underlie revolutionary process”, by Marea Clasista y Socialista, International Viewpoint 395, December 2007.
[2] Socialist Democracy (DS), a tendency forming part of the Workers’ Party in Brazil, regrouping the militants who identified with the Fourth International, took the decision to support the participation of one of its leaders, Miguel Rosseto, in the Lula government in the capacity of minister in charge of land reform. The policy followed by the Lula government quickly led to tensions within the left of the PT and in particular in the DS, one of whose leaders, Senator Heloísa Helena, was expelled from the PT by the leadership for having opposed the counter-reforms of this government. Heloísa Helena, along with the members of Parliament expelled from the PT and important sectors of the PT left (including a minority of the DS) then decided to build a new party, Socialism and Freedom Party. The “Enlace” current regroups within the PSOL, among others, the militants of the Fourth International who have broken with the DS, which remains pro-governmental. For the debate between the leadership of the Fourth International and the DS, see International Viewpoint 389, May 2007.
ISSN 1294-2495 International Viewpoint, produced under the auspices of the Fourth International
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