2008-09-22

Financial Collapse or Revolution

Only a Revolution will stop Imperialism

Anybody who has the slightest understanding of political economy, who has read Naomi Klein's book, Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism can recognize this phase in history. This is a period marked by massive looting of working class resources in the form of everything from taxpayer dollars to mortgage payments and retirement funds.

Anybody who has an inkling about history itself, and can put words together into logical sentences, can see how this is part of the capitalist economic cycle. And this cycle cannot be permitted to dominate our consciousness. We must gain control of Imperialism's demise. Without the self-led African proletariat becoming the Revolutionary spark that will end Imperialism, we are just caught up in the madness.

From 1929, the saying "Behind every boom follows a bust" has been the primary theory behind capitalist macro-economics. And the housing market went from boom in the mid 90s to bubble in the late 90s and up thru 2006. Then the bubble busted when interest rates jumped from 5.5% to what 11.5%, 12%?

How and why did these rates change, who manipulated them and on whose directions, are questions which must be answered to the satisfaction of the people whose money is going to bail out a bloodsucking financial system.

Some folks blame it on credit, that the US economy operates on credit, yet that is about true as the black middle class saying, that black folks don't produce anything. We produce plenty, we just do not own what we produce.

And in reply to the conception that American economics operate on credit is to assume that someone other than those who generate the wealth are entitled to it.

Working people create wealth, workers create surplus, which the capitalist system CONVERTS into abstract issues such as stocks, bonds and paper money. This wealth also allows the capitalists to create legal fictions called laws, which defend private property, yet once we break thru the psychological and political concepts which are like the imaginary boundaries in a sport, the system of private ownership will be broken.

Now whereas the rise in rates affected people with Adjustable Rate Mortgages (ARMs), the pundits proclaimed -- puppet-mouth drivel reiterated a million times like Hitler's infamous lie -- "those people bought more house than they could afford." It placed the blame on homeowners for sophisticated articles of legal fraud held in the hands of banks. ARMs, IRAs, Keoghs, CDs, pension plans and other asset-backed paper are formulated by the legal departments of financial institutions, and legalized by a legislative system bent on deregulating an already rotten system.

Yet other forces declared an opposite truth, that these people were legally swindled by predatory lending agencies. Said agencies, such as Countrywide and Credit Suisse, have either foundered under the weight of anti-discriminatory lawsuits and/or have been looted by their shareholders as in the case of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. In any case, the Fed bailed out the rotten finance instutions rather than the people who generate the wealth which was looted by both banks and government.

The housing market began the slide which started in July 2007 when the stock market climbed to over 14,000 points. It had nowhere to go except down, and within three weeks it fell 297 points. This shook the European Common Bank -- which controls the EU Common Market the way the Fed controls US currency and other issues -- and the US was left responsible for stabilizing THAT economy. At that time, the term "MASSIVE LIQUIDITY INJECTION" became the code words for using taxpayer money for corporate welfare. Banks, the highest level of business organization, needed bailed out by a government which has a difficult time featuring how to help poor people, people hit by floods and storms, and those who have lost their jobs due to export of capital resources by US businesses and financial institutions.

However, that is not all what happened. It was because of the conniving POLITICAL MANIPULATION of interest rates, from the Clinton era on thru Bush 43, which instigated this problem. Yet the problem is more complex than just interest rate manipulation. Today, the same forces which caused the rise in fuel prices (not COSTS), cause the cascade effect going on in the banking industry.

If America's financial crisis results in an economic meltdown across the board, that will not be good. It will not portend any favorable news for Africa or Africans. What we must understand is that Imperialism cannot be permitted to collapse on its own. It must be brought down thru violent revolution. Imperialism cannot just fall apart, otherwise, all the reactionary forces of white power will be unleashed. That is why we have to understand our role as revolutionaries and how to organize all forces thru out society to bring about the demise of Imperialism and to bring in the era of Socialist revolution.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Unite_and_Resist_Campaign/

2008-09-12

African Internationalism

To Build a Kilombo Republic


For centuries Capitalism has ravaged African people. It has enslaved us on our native soil to deplete our land of minerals and herds and trees and people. It has dragged our people across the face of the Earth in its quest for slave labor. Where capitalism has been able to own everything in sight it did, including the workers which made this system possible. Capitalism has been the worst blight ever encountered anywhere by African people worldwide on planet Earth mud.

It must be added that colonialism committed these crimes, and modern colonialism springs out of Capitalist political and economic domination. It forms the primary mode of Capitalist domination so it is, in effect and for all intents and purposes, the very expression of Capitalism and without it the Capitalist system cannot possibly exist.

Only thru colonialism have Capitalists created primitive accumulation. Capitalism accrues wealth at times considered non-capitalist or pre-capitalist economic contributions. However, that view of primitive accumulation no longer justifies the terms "non-capitalist" and "pre-capitalist".

Interhamwe press gangs in Democratic Republic of Congo dug coltan for Americans to enjoy their SONY Playstations, X-Boxes and other high-tech toys. The press gangs (corvees) were presided over by the interhamwe, the name for Rwandan and Burundi death squads. Such production once fell under the purview of being non-capitalist inasmuch that capitalism doesn’t formally recognize the labor conditions which extracted the raw material for capitalist use. It doesn’t seem to reflect the Adam Smith concept of free markets and laissez faire.

Yet and still, this was all done within the capitalist sphere. It was done for capitalism. It was an aspect of Imperialism and a function made possible thru neo-colonialism. Hence, the term non-capitalist production is inadequate. This is the very essence of a capitalism which seeks the cheapest labor market available. For this reason, and millions more, capitalism must be eradicated.

It is important to get this point across. We can no longer consider “primitive accumulation” to be non-capitalist or pre-capitalist without assuming Adam Smith was correct about capitalism. We have to say Smith was an idealist whose concept was out of touch with reality. Primitive accumulation is capitalism at its most brutal. Primitive accumulation is the place where labor markets are slashed to fire sale and bargain basement prices, to turn a phrase. Primitive accumulation is capitalism at its bloodsucking, murderous best.

It is important for all people, particularly Africans, to understand this part of Capitalism, its development and its origins. If a thing was rotten at its birth, it will be rotten until its death.

African Internationalism elaborates this theory of primitive accumulation, the key to understanding capitalist relationships. All revolutionary theory is based on scientific socialism, and the theory of international working class unity. Elaborating the theory of primitive accumulation (articulated by Rodney, Eric Williams, Galeano and Yeshitela, among others), de-legitimizes Capitalism.

The elaboration of the theory of primitive accumulation deconstructs the mythos of Capitalism being based in the Protestant work ethic or some other force separate from and outside of colonialism. Yeshitela has done great work on this, and giving the field its name, he is not the first nor will he be the last to study and elaborate upon the theory of primitive accumulation, which soils the pristine whitewashed façade of Capitalism and its relationship to democracy, the welfare state, and other public pretenses to Imperialism’s "moral high-ground".

Plus, Kwame Nkrumah's critique atop Lenin's analysis – Imperialism as the highest stage of Capitalism – evinces that neo-colonialism is the last stage of Imperialism. Nkrumah’s definitive contribution here rescues his legacy from the series of half-steps, mistakes and blunders which marked his presidency.

Frantz Fanon also discussed neo-colonialism in A Dying Colonialism, altho he did not give it a name. Mao Zedong talked all around neo-colonialism without actually discussing it. He discussed colonialism and semi-colonialism, compradors, and anti-colonial struggle but missed the analysis of neo-colonialism. Amazingly and oh so artistically, Lorraine Hansberry covered it years before anybody thru a dynamic soliloquy within Raisin in the Sun, a play about struggles and family battles in 1950s urban Chicago.

However, Nkrumah stands heads and shoulders above them inasmuch that he defined the phenomenon, named it and described its relationship to a particular period in capitalist development. Nkrumah analyzed how Imperialism demanded a new relationship with its colonies; that they were still colonies, except the formal ties had been dissolved between the bloodsucking colonial State and the host nation, so that a state could arise where before none had existed. And these states were micro-states, not in that they were small, but because they were ill-formed, immature and unprepared to manage the affairs of flag independence.

Which sums up the basic theoretical work for us except for one last major piece: the reduction of capital as it relates to revolutionary collectivism.

While for dialecticians the field of activity takes place in the streets, churches, union halls, backrooms, bars, forums, classrooms, workplaces, and sometimes in the alleys, fighting to win the hearts and minds of black workers and allies to our cause.

So, one old adage helps us understand how capitalism operates, that "all fortunes begin with a crime." Which is to say, that accumulation of wealth outside of or beyond the "normal" or "legal" forms of Capitalist interchange does not imply that these means are not Capitalist. To admit as much would eliminate entire political economies from the sphere of Capitalist development. It would omit the great economies of today because of their criminal, genocidal origins.

Without what most people consider the criminal and genocidal origins of Capitalism, its roots in primitive accumulation as it were, there would be no Capitalism today.

Here you see, the most conspicuous feature of Capitalism is the crisis in social relations, itself a product of the class struggle between dispossessed workers and their rich, bloodsucking bosses. In fact, the modern worker derives his/her very identity from the labor performed by colonized Africans known as slaves. Capitalism begat the only system-wide economy based on corvee labor (forced work gangs), which is why the term "slavery" doesn't critically define the role of the colonized worker. Slavery in non-capitalist societies had little comparable (except for Roman galley slaves, and those in mines) to what existed in the Capitalist colonies.

Slavery in Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, Africa and Arabia all had little comparison to the systematic abduction and gang-labor activity that American and European capitalists employed. These privateers stole millions of people from their homes and put them to work on plantations, in mines and factories halfway across the world. This started Capitalism, defended by the musket, financed by looting and plundering, and grown by transforming raw material into finished goods.

Some forces on the Left elucidate Adam Smith's version of the Capitalist ideal as opposed to what Capitalism actually does, an idea of the free market in contrast to Milton Friedman's. Yet Smith did not comprehend the genuine origins of Capitalism rooted in royal treasures pillaged by kings and knights to finance expeditions to the Americas, to African kingdoms, to the Asiatic coasts in India, Burma and Cathay. Adam Smith imagined an ideal Capitalism which hurt nobody, in which no slaves existed and servants were all too happy to get the trickle down goodies with dropped from the master's table like manna from heaven.

That Capitalism never ever existed except in fiction. It was impossible for that pure Capitalism to exist, tho the wealthy insulated themselves from colonial horrors thru masterpieces honed by Monet, Shakespeare, Da Vinci, Beethoven and made even more exquisite by the influx of exotic commodities – like sugar, chocolate, bananas, coffee, mud cloth, kinte, tobacco, cotton and silk – imported from colonized lands.

Markets have always opened to Capitalism thru force of arms rather than free trade.

Friedman also promoted a pristine Capitalism which does not exist. So he dipped into Malthus to promote a Capitalism assisted by the State, just short of a fascist regime, looting public assets and using government to open frontiers for Imperialism to spread. VI Lenin examined this phenomenon in State and Revolution. Lenin explained the role of the state as it facilitates the bourgeois class exploitation of workers and other producing classes. He discussed the predatory warfare of the bourgeois state, that this was a measure to deepen the misery and oppression of the producing classes. Lenin discovered the State as an instrument of class oppression, and (bourgeois) democracy as a tool to hoodwink the masses.

The Friedman model concurs with this view from the opposite end of the spectrum, that is, as a reactionary. Milton Friedman does not openly advocate a police state at the disposal of Capitalism. But he shows no regard for human rights, he lacks consideration for democratic principles and norms, and liquidates working people as the historical force which shapes the forward motion of society. Friedman insisted that the Capitalists define history, and that they have every right and obligation to unilaterally determine the path of society.

Like Adam Smith, Milton Friedman imagined a “pure” capitalism, one unfettered by regulations, agencies, laws, markets, unions, international agreements, tariffs, etc. Friedman spoke as tho he were guided by pure unadulterated idealism yet the man was a rapacious, insatiable bamboozler searching for suckers to implement his vision. This must be emphasized with conviction and clarity, that anytime the concept of purity is introduced into a social critique, that is the viewpoint of an extremist and a fanatic who should not be trusted under any circumstances. From Adam Smith’s concept of pure capitalism to Adolph Hitler’s idea of racial purity to Friedman’s belief in pure markets, history records views which seek to purge the social aspect from society. The idea of purity in society is like Hitler’s paintings of street scenes with no social activity, no people in them, neatly kept streets and cities devoid of the people who built them. That is an anti-social absurdity.

Friedman unintentionally proved Lenin’s principle, that politics is nothing but economics concentrated. Only politicians could swing his theories into motion; Friedman’s ideas could not exist without government collaboration, altho he propagated the false notion that capitalism can only work effectively without government. Friedman’s ideology spawned fascist dictatorships thru out Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula. This notion defines the current period of Capitalism. It was yet to be tested in the United States, until Ronald Reagan tried it. Friedman’s ideas influenced the entire neo-conservative movement from Reagan thru to Bush 43.

Where stagflation had set in during Carter’s old boy administration, Reagan’s voodoo economics caused massive unemployment and housing failures that lasted until the end of Bush 41. The Great Communicator’s maxims – like supply-side economics, trickle down theory, catsup is a vegetable and greed is good – all encapsulate the mentality of the neo-conservative movement.

Reagan still believed in the Constitution, in rugged individualism and private property, yet he was unable to completely implement his strategy. Reagan succeeded in dropping trade barriers, and that began the massive export of capital resources from strategic US industrial centers. Reagan ran up incredible deficits based on supply-side theorem, cut and spend policies, and increased militarism. His policies set the stage for the disastrous ideas promulgated by Bush 43.

Bill Clinton followed the Reagan-Bush era by naming Alan Greenspan chairman of the Fed, and his policies seemed to remedy the housing/construction crisis. But Clinton’s burgeoning prison system derives from Friedman’s dictates. Clinton – having never countered the ideology of greed and selfishness started by the Reagan neo-cons – created policy that, on the one hand, spawned an entire prison-industrial archetype, supported by welfare-fraud laws to criminalize black women, and three-strikes sentencing codes to deepen the black prisoner-base. This became the fastest growing segment of the US economy.

Today, the fastest growing segment of US capitalism includes the bail out industry initiated by swindler banks to the tune of $5.1 trillion, and the $12 billion per month war economy. While Greenspan lowered interest rates and stimulated housing and construction, Bernanke raised them and caused their collapse, the ripple effect of which became felt all the way thru to the oil industry. The deep pocket investors who rolled their money on Wall Street demanded deregulation of oil so they could recoup their gambled plunder via speculation in the oil market. Same guys, same game, same crap table except this time they are rolling bigger stakes in a bigger hustle. Behind every boom follows a bust.

Those sworn to bring down Imperialism must understand these things. Slavery, human trafficking, forced labor gangs and drug wars exist because of Capitalism, not in spite of it. The limited duration and limited usage of capital force private owners into ever more desperate efforts to make greater piles of money. This is the Capitalism which has defined black life in the US and everywhere else African people live. It defines life from A to Z, America to Zimbabwe, and many places in between.

So it is, the Black Liberation dialectic has become blurred with the struggle for survival in a hostile capitalist world economy. South Africa, Zimbabwe and Mozambique have all become tinderboxes where Imperialism has sworn to destabilize their victories over it. Zimbabwe has been singled out for special demonization, with black-skinned critics leading the charge. Yet, while the right to criticize is upheld, the spirit of that criticism departs from the liberation of the Zimbabwean African massed. It is also linked with increasing criticism of South Africa because of recent attacks inside the country characterized as “xenophobic pogroms”, as well as the fact the South Africans were slow to pressure the Zimbabwean government for its missteps.

America, the great enemy of black liberation, drags its black slaves out of the ghetto and around the World to showcase its purported democracy, based on a new colonialism. This neo-colonialism fragments the unstable US black community, and further separates us from other Africans because the racist “culture war” maintains victory by dashing Black unity to pieces.

Neo-colonialism, having reached near total saturation, screams out to the masses to join in on the genocide against their own class and nation. It first screamed out in a most obvious form, from the open collaborators with Imperialism. Now it makes its voice heard from the corners and podiums of what poses for the Black Liberation Movement. However, Imperialism cannot genuinely accommodate this saturation level. America lacks the democratic space and the political will to achieve justice for all those whom it invites into its fold.

This limitation defines the essential contradiction rooted within the financial crisis sweeping thru American neighborhoods, factories, and banks. It is the fundamental limitation of capitalism, the inability to relieve oppression and repression and exploitation, since Capitalism’s very existence remains based in perpetuating reactionary, subhuman conditions.

America tenders not one cent toward helping African people transform their economies from anti-black colonial slave centers. These valiant workers and peasants inherited economies slanted entirely against them, weighing them down in the race for development, and having only a handful of educated and trained personnel to help make the transformation. America has done nothing to expedite their prosperous ascension within the family of nations. America has never recognized their uphill fight against the fascism of apartheid and colonialism. Yet the United States has been quick to condemn the errors of the Black Liberation Movement, and its hindered efforts.

And whereas, on the neo-conservative side Clarence Thomas once cited Malcolm X to express his neo-colonialist ambition at the expense of African people, the negro-colonial Left currently repudiates Malcolm and quotes Cabral to preface their public betrayals of the Black Liberation Movement. However, dialectics and revision do not go together, and all remarks by the neo-colonialist sector cannot taint Malcolm X’s martyrdom in the hearts of the masses.

Mao Zedong discussed, in Selected Military Writings, the interior lines and exterior lines of combat. He talked about this because of the dialectic involved in maintaining principled and steeled revolutionary clarity. Neo-colonialism within the Black Liberation Movement may present a paradox, yet it exists because Imperialism needs to undermine the workers struggle.

The Black Liberation Movement is for the masses of African people, for them to seize and exercise power. Black liberation overthrows and dismantles the instruments of exploitation and oppression which rules over Africans, and builds a human social system to abolish private ownership, arms races and wars, and the crises in production and social relationships.

Clearly, the Black Liberation Movement must forcefully mark its territory. It must create splits thru out the neo-colonialist infrastructure. It must make its ideological attacks on Imperialism. Capitalism itself supplies a vast source of agitational material for revolutionary organizers.

Black revolutionary workers have a duty to undermine confidence that the system will straighten out this crisis. We must make short shrift of the State ideology, the functions of its branches, its relationship to big Capital, and its alienation from the masses of people.

The Imperialist power structures, or capitalist central committees, have failed to realize the deep set aversion to occupation war – and hence its obsolescence – within their societies. With the bailouts of parasitic banks in the midst of a widespread housing crisis, the Imperialist power structure has overestimated society’s tolerance for exploitation. Energy prices have shot up because of supply-side deregulation, a doctrine of neo-conservative government, which also auctions off public assets to the highest bidder. Anti-democratic laws from the Telecom Act to the Patriot Act undermine workers rights and set the stage for sweeping repression.

Capitalism is a class-based system which dominates relationships between nations, between societies and classes, the rich and the poor, the great and the small, and between women and men. This degenerate system, birthed in human trafficking and genocide, today strives for validation thru the ascendancy of black slaves to positions of power formerly reserved for Imperialism's white colonial masters. Today, Capitalism is in crisis, grasping for anything to keep it afloat. The role of black revolutionaries is to make sure this system drowns.

Revolutionary Collectives for the Reduction of Capital
Making sure capitalism drowns is a task set for real organization. It turns to the theory of the reduction of capital. By reducing all forms of capital as the primary means of economic activity, the capitalists find their wealth becoming useless. This means that they cannot use their wealth for power, or to buy their way out of jams. It levels the playing field, and forces them to distribute their assets, otherwise those assets will be seized, eventually.

The reduction of capital calls for the building of revolutionary workers collectives. These collectives operate in all places of production. They form the basis of factory takeovers, mine takeovers, etc. But the collectives also operate in government and elsewhere. The Russians called them soviets. We call them maroon societies, palenques and kilombos. These organizations are based on democratic-centralism, mutual aid, revolutionary action, and dual and contending political power.

While the Black Panther Party build the biggest, most widespread and successful system of revolutionary collectives, the Panthers did not realize how important and crucial this activity was in undermining the Imperialist power structure. None of the organizations which have critiqued the Panthers have attempted to build anything similar. Organizations which ran parallel to the Panthers (AAPRP, APSP-Uhuru, RNA, RAM) have built upon the Panthers’ ideological legacy, but not upon its structural links to the masses thru free breakfast programs, food and clothing giveaways, childcare, and other institutions.

This is not to say these groups have not had similar institutions, but they have not been permanent, entrenched institutions within these organizations.

(In the last 40 years, North America’s white Left has contributed very little to these struggles. It has lagged ideologically, and has allowed the trade union movement to suffer staggering defeats. Yet it was the Black Liberation Struggle in North America which took the brunt of repression, so that the white Left could have shown some courage and character by comradely struggle. For this reason, the self-led proletariat must be African Internationalist and assume leadership over the entire revolutionary center in North America.)

Now, by taking capital out of circulation to distribute wealth amongst the masses is a form of economic erosion. By taking wealth out of circulation for mass distribution, and in so doing no currency is exchanged by a significant section of society, that erodes the capitalist system. Even if no collectives have formed at this point, the trend moves in that direction. As people notice how the stress of living under capitalism places them in competition and conflict with one another, they understand that working collectively relieves that stress. The point of production no longer is a point. It is no longer an edge, no longer a blade, a bullet, a bomb a tank a cop a prison or a factory boss. The point of production no longer arrives as a 1040 form biting off your wallet. There is no more point now but a movement which threatens capitalist production, the status quo, and world wide Imperialism.

Unbeknownst to the Panthers, that is what they had done. They had developed a style of work which threatened to shape into a form of broad-based economic activity. What made this lack of competition such a threat to the system? It competed with the notion of competition, the notion of turning workers into crabs in a barrel, crawling over one another to escape. The Panthers smashed the idea of capitalism as the ultimate economic system and replaced that notion with clarity about our roles as human beings, our social responsibility towards one another. They invented something new in America, and it threatened the status quo. It is our job to resurrect their work, to rebuild the work they had done to take capital out of circulation and redistribute it amongst the masses in the form of fighting soviets, maroon societies, palenques and kilombos.

The fighting workers collective marks a decisive battleground for Imperialism. Where people decide to make a stand, to separate from the capitalist state and society, to define revolutionary culture and activity, will be the site where Imperialism will be buried. This place has to be where capital is taken out of circulation and divvied up into pieces for society to share. As many instruments of capital as exist are as many forms of wealth that have been concentrated into the hands of a small class of people. By taking away the authority of those instruments – asset-backed commercial paper (ABCP) in the form of bonds, arbitrages, money-manager funds, bearer bonds, sureties, stocks, chips, and other sundry abstracts for everything from energy and agricultural futures to real estate and multi-national firms – and reducing them to nothing more than their concrete economic forms, capital is therefore diminished. It is no longer transferable in liquid form. The power to buy a private army to shield the capitalist from public scrutiny and power disappears.

For some people, they believe that violent revolution will be the burial ground of Imperialism. It will play the first critical role. But as Socialism must grow as a worldwide phenomenon, there will be pockets of “post-capitalist” society, as it were, fighting against socialism or at least politicizing for capitalism. However many purges and massacres of ruling class elitists follow, that will not solve the problem of dead enders who continue to luxuriate in or defend (even if only in their hearts) capitalism. What will solve that contradiction is the massive redistribution of wealth and the reduction of all forms of commerce to the simplest forms of currency. Notes held in private must become worthless. Whenever these things are presented, they must be confiscated. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

Personal property differs from private property in that it is small and insignificant and does not require legal transfer following ones death. Personal property is not a form of wealth, and plays no role in commerce. It is something which is out of circulation for everybody except perhaps pawnbrokers. Your house is real estate, but you usually have no interest in selling it as a commodity because it is collectively possessed by your family. While you owe the bank up to the last payment, the real owner, whose controlling interest is the mortgage until that last payment is made, this is the closest thing to private property that the working class experiences.

Private property involves real estate and other substantial forms of wealth. While it is bought and sold at the owners discretion, it is a form of commerce. The capitalist class considers everything something which can be bought and sold, including labor. If it were able to outright own labor, as it once did, the capitalists would be delighted with that as a form of power. That capitalism has to pay for labor is a great source of discontent for Imperialism, as it seeks cheaper labor markets to produce simple goods and services.

For this reason the export of capital has been an important feature of the Imperialist stage of capitalism, as well as a feature of neo-colonialism. Capital export has several functions. In some cases it is to stabilize micro-states; in this instance, it assumes the form of an outright grant or a loan that must be repaid. The micro-state, itself nothing more than a bureaucratic shell overseeing raw material extraction, usually has a highly paid and oversized military, this for enforcing production and putting down dissent and rebellion. Other than that, the micro-state is useless.

Another form of capital export has to do with simply building factories and support structure for pursuing cheap labor markets. Of course, cheap labor markets can mean anything from sweatshop workers to press gangs (corvees) in mines and on plantations. Support structure means roads and ports for material transport, packing facilities, and communications. Sometimes this includes workers housing, but mostly they are on their own.

So in the reduction of capital, these workers would take over all facilities. They would rely neither on the State nor the bosses, forming their own ruling councils, linked to a central authority supportive of their demands. This authority must articulate the ambitions of the workers councils, or fighting soviets (or palenques, maroon societies, or kilombos), and the goal of reducing capital transfers. The palenques must commandeer experts, elites and others who have skills which facilitate their production efforts, and the distribution of their product.

The Ideological Paradox

Democracy thru Imperialism


While the West likes to brag about democracy, this idea came late to the game, long after capitalism’s momentum against the rights of indigenous peoples had gained full steam. Democracy was not even a philosophical construct for Colombus, Da Gama, Pizarro, Hudson, Magellan, DeLeon, Napoleon, Leopold and other conquistadors and emperors. Such persons made the scramble for the Americas and Africa a priority for Europe from 1492 thru the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, and beyond. When the United States drafted a “democratic constitution” in 1776, its democracy remained beyond the grasp of colonized peasants, slaves and press gangs, and natives in the way of land grabs. This democracy had nothing to do with us, even tho we lived here.

Democracy did not become available to the colonized until after the Second World War. At this time, colonized workers around the world began fighting for their freedom and liberation. They began the hard uphill battle to become free from colonialism. In most cases, rather than go to war against an enemy spread out across the globe, the colonial powers reluctantly gave up direct colonial rule.

Imperialism, which had been defined by Lenin early in the century, was a mature social force when colonized zones began agitating for freedom in the Fifties. He defined Imperialism as the fusion of banking capital with industrial capital to form international finance capital. Lenin went on to describe how banks and multi-national firms would reshape the world by developing economies greater than many countries, dominating states in place of the colonial powers, and effectively operating as their own capitalist fiefdoms.

During the Fifties, African colonies lobbied for their independence. Ghana, Cote d’Ivoire, Guinea-Conakry, Zambia and other states emerged. Algeria successfully waged a guerilla war against France for its independence. Congo-Leopoldville (Congo-Kinshasa, today) started on a briefly democratic road until western Imperialism derailed its with an invasion and total occupation of the country by an international force of Europeans, Americans, South Africans, Rhodesians, Israelis and Australians. This culminated in the violent overthrow of democratically-elected Patrice Lumumba and his life immolated by occupation forces. Since then, Congo-Kinshasa has been a contested zone ruled by Imperialist stooges and maintained by forced labor gangs.

This is, in essence, democracy thru Imperialism. Without submission to Imperialism first, there will be no democracy. This explains the hostility of the United States towards Cuba, Iran, Libya, Zimbabwe, Vietnam, North Korea, the former Soviet Union and, currently, Venezuela.

In French Indo-China, the Vietnamese fought for and won their liberation on the battlefield, first against Japanese occupation forces, then against French re-colonizers, and finally against the US military machine. Vietnam waged the most epic struggles of the 20th Century, and exposed Imperialism’s weaknesses.

Democracy thru Imperialism is what we see in the series of US military invasions and CIA coups going back to the sinking of the Maine in Havana harbor in 1900 to the 2001 WTC bombings and its aftermath, and culminating with the 2003 Iraq invasion and occupation.

After World War II, in the US, the struggle for national democratic rights first assumed the stance of civil rights, then shaped itself into the Black Power Movement. Historians call this “racial segregation” as if it were a democratic phenomenon with which Africans had agreed. But this was racism, unilaterally codified by bloodsucking US white power. Whenever historians and journalists discuss racial segregation, clearly they mean racist segregation, Segregation based on racism has nothing mutual implied in its definition, and is therefore anti-democratic. The term racial segregation lets historians dilute the social construct of racism. They subtly imply that racial concepts are mutually agreed upon as if Africans had an active interest in maintaining the racist status quo. That case only arises with a few exceptions like 1893 Booker T Washington or 2008 Ward Connerly, Clarence Thomas, Shelby Steele, or Jesse Lee Patterson. But these exceptions violate the rule for the base majority of Africans; these exceptions serve the most vicious political wing of Imperialism, and they prosper outside the mainstream of the African community.

So tho the civil rights movement maintained a pro-imperialist stance, it unintentionally exposed the violent, anti-democratic underpinnings of the capitalist system. Its leaders and agitators were assaulted, fire hosed, beaten, arrested, abducted, tortured, assassinated, and lynched.

What happened when the Black Power Movement built itself off of popular discontent arising from the mistreatment of nonviolent civil rights workers was the direct, militarized intervention of the State in the form of police assault teams, police hit squads and kangaroo trials. This repressive activity resulted in assassinations, material destruction of programs and institutions and political parties, frame-ups and detentions of organizers, and their exile or imprisonment. This history is well documented, and reparations have not been made for this period or the era of anti-democratic, racist segregation which preceded it.

It is also important to distinguish between anti-democratic and non-democratic behavior. Anti-democratic behavior is repressive. It is racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, and operates on behalf of a political system such as Imperialism or capitalism. Anti-democratic behavior is as paradoxical as democracy thru Imperialism, which means that it exists within structures assumed to be democratic. Black Codes and Jim Crow laws were passed by democratically-elected state assemblies, parliaments or congressional houses, who failed to defend democratic rights for African people numbered among their constituencies.

Non-democratic implies the absence of democracy such as exists within the colonized community as its members relate towards one another. It describes political culture under Imperialism.

A generation after the civil rights movement, today colonized Africans in America think they have it made. They want their part of the American dream, and America just won’t let them have it. It is a con game which originated in America and spread across a World which had little concept of the swindle, since rulers and chieftains had held their own subjects in peonage from antiquity. So today’s fat can swindlers – like lawyers, politicians, bankers, insurers, accountants and stock traders – drive Imperialism. They drive it solely in their own venal interests, for their own self-enrichment.

Whatever Karl Marx sed about capitalism being a thoroly rotten, bloodsucking system, well, he barely pipped the shell.

Of course, everybody kno that the labor product is converted into values appropriated and exchanged for commodities originally held as futures, securities or some other stake floated on paper to peel a profit off of anything produced, traded or consumed by honest, hard-working people. Based upon a mostly faulty yet quite often dishonest assessment of what happens in this economy, working people get lured into an investment scheme which persuades them to believe they may actually own part of the “American Dream”.

This swindle has been used against workers repeatedly in the housing market, the Savings and Loans busts, and stock-based retirement plans. Bank notes, shares, bearer bonds, stocks, mutual funds – their conversion from paper into real assets defines the best part of a process that 98% of all people lack any inkling of whatsoever.

For that reason, working people should be discouraged from participating in stock plans.

There’s the saying, After every boom follows a bust. The Dot Com shake out bankrupted 401k plans, KEOGHs, and other retirement funds. The Enron scandal era – which included MCI-WorldCom, Tyco and other notables – sucked up what was left. Teachers, clerks and other “educated” workers, whom most people expect to play it smart, got soaked. Think they would have learnt from the S&L swindles of the Eighties, when lenders robbed people outright and no perpetrators were ever prosecuted.

The current housing bust has shaken out dozens of investors who purchased asset-backed commercial paper (ABCP) with the expectation they would make a killing when interest rates rose. They never counted on the massive default rate from the introduction of exorbitant rates when Bernanke dictated interest rate deregulation, which adjusted the predatory mortgages upwards.

Currently, stock market surges and losses have reached an unpredictability which investors characterize as volatile. Subprime housing loans drove the stampede to mortgage lenders during the Greenspan era, now the crash bludgeons even buyers with perfect credit. Retail sales lag during this summer; gas prices keep seasonal vacationers home and effect food prices, while the debate over drilling ignores the fact that oil is a privately owned commodity and deregulation drives prices, not costs.

Housing is a real asset that can be sold out from under you due to no fault of your own. Mortgages, bought and sold by investors the moment one gets signed, are pieces of paper floated all over the globe. A minute number of deep pocket investors controlling the voluminous horde of mortgage debtors, a.k.a. “homeowners”, determine that sooner or later the herd will be eaten. Homes, stores, factories, office buildings and malls all sit on mortgaged property so the investment belongs to those making the loan. All the same, it is the loan which investors interest themselves in. They acquire supremacy over the market (economy) because of the massive value accumulated in so very few hands. When they enforce collections, that results in market corrections.

During a “market correction”, business fail or curtail production, resulting in higher unemployment. This spiraling effect has nothing to do with production but is based on seedy speculators whose very existence obstructs the flow of goods and services. Resources bottled up by a parasitic redundancy in trade relations can lead to the point where conflicts and wars erupt.

Indeed, the farmer can’t sell futures in his orange crop because the bank owns them and controls the market where they must be sold. Third-party negotiators then acquire rights to the futures and so on in transactions which do not benefit the real producer. A paradox, society can thrive without the banks and stock market, but not without the farmer. This system of wild market speculation drives prices not costs, accounting for the rise of fuel, interest rates, food, college degrees, health insurance, everything.

Keep dreaming. Anyone without a convenient $150k to sink into a mutual fund cannot even think about becoming a real capitalist. That designates the level where investments begin, as any commercial advertising portfolio prerequisites during PGA tournaments or NBA and NFL games may well tell you.

International finance capital, Imperialism, operates thru a political system which protects the swindlers and cares little for the masses. IMF-World Bank policies account for the horrendous wars in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Credit-Suisse, Deutsche Bank, CITICORP, Ameriquest Mortgage, Washington Mutual and HSBC Finance Corp. lead the shake out in the current housing bust. Some are defendants in discriminatory lending suits being pressed by the NAACP. Nobody can quite quantify the social impact, but look forward to a renewed phase of the racist wars against America's colonized workers.

Meanwhile, investors holding complex mortgage securities and Wall Street bankers always manage to come out on top. Homeowners, on the other hand, will never be winners under this system. The only advantage for the people is to decolonize their minds, return to the source, and break down Imperialism like kung fu masters…

What is the dollar value of one point on the NYSE? Anyone who doesn’t kno has no business letting their employers talk them into an IRA, CDs or a 401k. refuse to let your union leaders follow the advice of business agents who want to invest dues money in the stock market. Have they explained how that loot is converted, transferred, traded, exported and reinvested, ultimately prompting you to rant about foreign products and their threat to American workers?!

At the same time lenders poise to snatch the roof from over your family's heads, you want to bomb China, India, Pakistan, Mexico and the Ghetto.

Dirty, sexy money is the root of great evils. Its finance scams originated when the folks who violently swindled North America from the Indians redistributed it amongst the haves. This swindlers regime imposed itself upon the “new” Indians, working people. These same suckers pay record prices for gas swindled from Iraq, then send their kids to fight terrorism.

Yes, they blame Mexicans for trying to flee a more repressed economy. Suckers blame the Arabs for resisting a Beast who occupies their land. They blame neo colonies like China and India for jumping at dollars held out to them by American financiers. Homesteaders who slaughtered American Indians for the robber barons turn to racist political theory out of expedience. They blame Blacks, just because. In the heartland of the Homelanders, an ideological campaign must be carried out to turn society right side up.

For this reason, the African working class must understand that capitalism is a system made of many components and parts, and that ideas drive all these parts. Ideas play an important part in the function of capitalism, justifying the activities which people come to accept as normal. Yet our lifestyles under capitalism are anything except normal when we see how an enormous interwoven social fabric gives this system life. This social fabric consists of a vast ensemble of subsystems, political economies, private economies of scale, and modes which approximate slavery and feudalism.

When we see how the forces which justify capitalism peel away like the layers of an onion, that every time we remove one layer of the ideological shell we encounter another, we have to become comprehensive in our outlook and united in our collective struggle.

At one time, revolutionary thinkers broke down ideas like the Protestant work ethic, racist concepts against the black self-image, and the notion of who deserves democratic rights in this country. Today we wage the same collective struggle on an ever shifting sand dune. Now the battle cries scream out from Imperialism’s own contending economic philosophies, and our anti-imperialism aims to defeat an encirclement strategy which has unlimited wealth and power.

We have a responsibility not to allow capitalism just to collapse. It collapsed twice in the last century and caused two world wars. Capitalism’s massive failure during the Great Depression caused worldwide starvation and homelessness, increased repression and exploitation in colonized zones, the rise of fascism and Nazism, and the violent immolation of at least 11 million people in Europe.

Our job isn’t to hold up capitalism or allow it to collapse. Our job is to destroy it for all eternity.

The overthrow of capitalism means that social forces must take control of its demise. It means that a Revolution will ensure that capitalism will not fall of its own weight. Workers and fighters of all nationalities must bring down capitalism because of its antagonistic contradictions.

The self-led proletariat has the job of stalking, hunting, slaying, butchering and consuming capitalism the way a band of Africans brings down an elephant. Only our job is to organize the masses of society for this task, and to leave the distribution of the carcass to the workers.

On the one side of the bourgeois paradox – known as Imperialism thru Democracy – lies the territory of neo-liberal social policy which supports civil rights, multiculturalism and quotas, while simultaneously building the world’s biggest prison industrial complex. Criminalizing an entire population, neo-liberal political repression built a new political economy off the backs of one million imprisoned African workers.

The other side of the bourgeois paradox promotes Democracy thru Imperialism. This is the brand of neo-conservativism that has twisted the American psyche around the concept of empire.

Suppose the government decided to auction off the assets of the post office and give the job of delivering mail to a corporation. Neo-conservatives have tossed the idea around in public for a number of year going back to the Reagan Administration. Milton Friedman, traditionally considered the founder of the neo-conservative movement, advocated for years that the post office be privatized.

This is the ideology behind deregulation. It is a theory which states that deregulation harms the market economy, it shackles laissez faire capitalism, and creates repression. However, in every instance where Friedman’s policies have been implemented – except in economically insignificant European enclaves like Iceland and Estonia – political repression has followed.

The democratic concept of laissez faire capitalism is incompatible with Imperialism.

No capitalist economist remotely understands how social forces react against one another under the market economy. They see antagonisms within society but lack an analysis of class strata. They fail to address how the Imperialist centers dominate the former colonial world, causing destabilization in the form of shortages, inflation, wars and mass migrations.

A deregulated economic system under Imperialism spells disaster not only for the neo-colonial states but for Imperialism as well. While we don’t have the luxury of Friedman’s Chicago School masterminds to test our theorem, more than ample evidence exists that repression increases when industries are deregulated, and public assets sold to the highest bidder.

Examples abound, such as Chile under Pinochet, Latin American dictatorships in Honduras and Argentina, and in many African countries. Deregulation is not a factor in those places so much as the so-called laissez faire system of unregulated markets. There we see uprisings, disappearances of dissenters, wars over resources, oligarchy living next to abysmal poverty, press gang (corvee) labor, and coups d’etat.

Also, notably, the deterioration of infrastructure, contraction of paved roads, collapse of basic services, currency problems, liquidity crises, decline in education and employment, and other markers of social instability are whitewashed with extravagant displays of opulence by the rich and powerful. Entourages escorted by heavily armed military or private security forces, the proliferation of mansions by individuals in power, huge public expense for entertainment venues, and news concentrating on the lifestyles of the rich and famous complete the whitewash.

It is important to understand how deregulation causes these effects as much as studying the effects themselves. Unregulated market forces have nothing to do with spreading democracy; on the contrary, democracy has decreased across the world since the neo-conservatives have dominated American politics.

Democracy has decreased in America, because the war of terror has chilled dissent. The eight years of the Bush Administration has caused a decline in economic conditions thru out the US infrastructure. Higher unemployment, a decline in wages and salaries, a collapse of both the housing market and the banking industry, and a rise in fuel prices (not costs) which triggered a rise in costs for basic goods and services.

Looser regulation of the stock market has resulted in greater scandals and swindles. These swindles are being carried out by investment bankers against working and middle class people who have been persuaded over the last twenty to twenty-five years to invest in pension their own personal pension funds. Every five years or so, these funds get raided by corporate swindlers like Enron, Tyco, MCI-Worldcom, Martha Stewart, and others.

So where the stock market has less oversight, so do the banks. The mortgage swindle is the primary case in point. From the early years of the Clinton Administration, the Fed depressed interest rates, at the same time permitting banks to create sophisticated articles of fraud, most notably the Adjustable Rate Mortgage (ARM). Interest rates remained low for many years, encouraging the timid to dip into the volatile housing market and perhaps attain that most significant piece of the American pie. When the Bush Administration’s war policies began to fail, causing a crisis of confidence in the stock market, the Fed loosened interest rates, which immediately jumped skyward and locked people in usuriously. People with ARMs and other predatory loan packages began losing their homes. So much for their American dreams.

Now while unemployment rises, public services for poor people and soldiers’ families remains a source of repression. Concomitantly, the Fed floats billions of dollars in grants to banks, the highest level of business organization, while the country fights for a health plan. Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, government-backed financed corporations, were bailed one time so that dividends could be paid to shareholders, and now they and eleven other banks have their combined $5.1 trillion debt being backed by the government which declines help to the taxpayers who generate this wealth.

The housing crisis triggered several waves of economic instability, and continues to cause waves. In Europe, last year, the EU’s banking system felt heavy tremors and shortages of cash meant that banks were floating notes with decreased value. US banks refused to lend “to anything east of 212”, that being New York City’s area code. Europe is the only thing east of NYC.

Food shortages hit Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. In Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe and his ruling ZANU party unfairly bear the blame for runaway inflation there. Mexico has seen increases in criminal gang activity which threaten its security.

Because the banks could not successfully squeeze as many people as they preferred, they asked for and received legal permission to speculate in the oil market. This caused the price of oil to increase from around thirty dollars a barrel to over $110/barrel. The rise in price showed up at the pump at a cool $4.10 a gallon. This put a damper on drivers, but pointed the way towards less subjective energy consumption activity.

Our job as revolutionary workers is to understand that both liberal and conservative doctrine have nothing to do with democracy, but with carrot and stick policies. When one doesn’t work, the other is substituted. Revolutionary organizers must understand these trends so as to anticipate them, get out ahead of the masses, and provide leadership that will drive a wedge thru capitalism.

We need to see how the reactionary left and right operate so as to create a deeper rift between them. Our role is to consolidate our forces for maximum organizational power and begin the process of revolution. Any other method has proven ineffective.

2008-09-01

Sprinting into the record books: A gold medal for honor

granma.cu

A gold medal for honor

Havana, August 26

Reflections of Fidel

A gold medal for honor

IF one were to statistically work out the number of facilities, sport fields and sophisticated pieces of equipment we just saw in the recently concluded Olympic Games, accessible to every one million of the world's inhabitants; the number of swimming pools for diving and polo, artificial underfoot for track and field competitions or field hockey, basketball and volleyball courts, rapids for kayak races, cycle tracks for speed-bike races, firing ranges, and so on and so forth, one could conclude that they are beyond the reach of 80 percent of the countries that were represented in Beijing, which is equivalent to billions of people around the planet. China, an immense and millennia-old country with over 1,2 billion inhabitants, invested $40 billion in the construction of the Olympic facilities and it will still require time to satisfy the sporting needs of a society at the height of development.

If one calculates the total number of people living in India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Vietnam, the Philippines and other countries, not to mention the world's nearly 900 million Africans and more than 550 million Latin Americans, one will have an idea of the number of people around the world who have no access to these kinds of sport facilities.

It is in this light that we ought to analyze the news that surrounded the Olympic Games in Beijing.

The world enjoyed the Olympics because it was something it needed, because we wanted to see the smiles and emotions of the athletes who participated, particularly those who came in first place, whose perseverance and discipline were duly acknowledged.

Which one of them could be blamed for the colossal inequalities that exist in the world in which it is our lot to live? How can one forget, on the other hand, the hunger, malnutrition, lack of schools, teachers, hospitals, doctors, medications and basic means of sustenance that the world endures?

We are aware of what those who pillage and exploit the world we live in evidently want. Why did they unleash violence and make the risk of war more imminent, on the same day that the Olympic Games were inaugurated? That happened only 16 days ago.

Now, when the anesthesia has worn off, the world must again face its distressing and growing problems.

Some days ago, I wrote about Cuban sports. I had long been condemning the repulsive, mercenary-like maneuvers perpetrated against this revolutionary activity and writing in defense of the courage and honorable conduct of our athletes.

In the course of the competitions, I reflected on these matters. Perhaps I would not have decided to write something on the issue so soon if there had not been the incident involving the Cuban tae kwon do athlete, Angel Valodia Matos, Olympic champion in Sydney eight years ago. His mother died when he was competing there and winning a gold medal, 20,000 kilometers away from his country. Taken aback by a decision that struck him as utterly unfair, he protested and threw a kick in the direction of the referee. They had tried to buy off his trainer. He was already ill-disposed and angry. He couldn't hold back his anger.

The athlete was used to bravely endure the lesions that frequently arise in a tae kwon do match. The referee suspended him during the match when he was winning 3-2. It wasn't the only incident. In these types of matches, the referee has all the power and the athlete has none. The two Cubans, the tae kwon do athlete and trainer, were barred for life from participating in international competitions.

I saw when the referees shamelessly robbed two Cuban boxers of their victory during the semifinals. Our boxers put up a dignified and courageous fight, they were constantly on the offensive. They had their hopes set on winning, in spite of the referees. But to no avail: their fate had been sealed beforehand. I didn't see Correa's fight, where he was also robbed of his victory.

I feel no duty to remain silent about the deeds of this mafia. The latter has managed to make a mockery of the Olympic Committee rules. What they did to the young members of our boxing team, to complete the work of those who make a living out of stealing Third World athletes, was criminal. In their malice, they denied Cuba even one Olympic gold medal in this discipline.

Cuba has never bought an athlete or referee. There are sports in which referees are very corrupt and our athletes have to fight both the adversary and the referee. Cuban boxers, whose prestige is internationally recognized, have had to face bribery and corruption attempts aimed at violently snatching gold medals from the country, at buying highly trained and experienced boxers, as they try to do in the case of baseball players and other prominent athletes.

The Cuban athletes who competed in Beijing and, instead of gold medals, brought home silver or bronze medals or any kind of acknowledgment are to be commended as representatives of amateur sports, which rekindled the Olympic movement. They are without parallel in the world.

What dignity they showed during the competitions!

Professional athletics were introduced into the Olympics because of commercial interests which turned sports and athletes, as we've said, into mere commodities.

Cuba's Olympic baseball team showed an exemplary conduct. In Beijing, they twice defeated the U.S. selection, the country that invented that sport which, because of the commercial interests of big companies, was excluded from the Olympics. This year, 2008, is, for now, its last in the Olympics.

The final match against South Korea was dubbed the tensest and most extraordinary that the Olympics have ever known. The game was decided in the last inning, with three Cubans on base and an out.

The adversary's professional baseball players were like batting machines. They had a left-handed pitcher who threw varied speed balls with surgical precision. An excellent team. Cubans do not practice the sport for profit. They are trained, as all our athletes are, to serve their country. Were this not the case, the country, small in size and of limited resources, would lose them forever. It would be impossible to calculate the value of the recreational and educational services they offer the nation in the course of their lives, in all provinces and the Isle of Youth.

In volleyball, Cuba's team defeated the U.S. selection in the qualifying round. They had been climbing from the lowest end of a more than 50-rung ladder. Even though they returned with no medals, this is a feat that will go down in history.

After a difficult match against a Russian rival, Mijaín proudly won Cuba’s first gold medal in the discipline.

Dayron Robles won the gold by a wide margin. The rain had soaked the brand-new track. Without the rain, he could have easily broken the Olympic record, let alone the world record he had set weeks earlier in the difficult 110-meter hurdles, which requires pinpoint accuracy. He is a disciplined and tenacious 21-year-old with nerves of steel.

Yoanka González won Cuba's first Olympic cycling medal.

Leonel Suárez, who won a bronze medal in the decathlon, will turn 21 in September. The results obtained in each of the 10 competitions in their extremely difficult sports are indeed impressive.

There are many athletes of great merit, men and women I cannot mention here but who cannot be forgotten.

More than 150 athletes from our small island participated in the 2008 Olympics and put up a fight in 16 of 28 sport disciplines there.

Our country does not practice chauvinism or commercialize sports, which are as sacred as the people’s education and health. What it practices, rather, is solidarity. Years ago, it created a Physical Education and Sports Training School, with capacity for more than 1,500 students from the Third World. With that same spirit of solidarity, it celebrates the triumph of the Jamaican sprinters, who won six gold medals, the Panamanian jumper who won a gold medal, the Dominican boxer that won the same medal or that of the Brazilian volleyball players who dealt a crushing defeat to the U.S. team and came in first.

In addition to this, thousands of Cuban sports trainers have worked in Third World countries.

These merits do not exempt us in the least from assuming present and future responsibilities. In world sporting competitions, for the reasons we pointed out, a qualitative leap has taken place. We no longer live in the time in which we managed to become the world's first in gold medals per inhabitant in relatively little time, and that isn’t going to happen again, of course.

We account for around 0.07 % of the world’s population. We cannot be strong in all sports like the United States, which has at least 30 times our population. We cannot have access to even 1 % of the facilities and different types of equipment that they possess, nor avail ourselves of the varied climates they have. The same holds for the rest of the rich world, which has at least twice as many inhabitants as the United States does. They account for around one billion inhabitants.

The fact that more nations are competing and competitions are now tougher attests, in part, to Cuba's victory as an example to the rest of the world. But we are resting on our laurels. Let us be honest and recognize this, all of us. It doesn’t matter what our enemies are saying. Let us be serious about this. Let us go over every discipline, every human and material resource we devote to sports. We must analyze this deeply, apply new ideas, concepts and knowledge. We must distinguish between what is done for the sake of our citizens’ health and what is done for the sake of competing and making this instrument more accessible for the wellbeing and health of everyone. We could abstain from competing outside the country and the world would not end because of this. I think the best course of action is to compete both inside and outside the country, to face all difficulties and make better use of all human and material resources available.

Let us prepare ourselves for important future battles. Let us not be taken in by London’s smiles. There, we will find European chauvinism, corrupt referees, the buying of muscle and brains (an incalculable loss) and a strong dose of racism.

Let no one even dream that London will achieve the level of safety, discipline and enthusiasm that we saw in Beijing. One thing is certain: there will be a Conservative government that is perhaps less belligerent than the current one.

Let us not forget the decency, honesty and professional prestige enjoyed by our international referees and internationalist sport workers.

All of our solidarity accompanies the tae kwon do athlete and his trainer. For those who are returning today, the ovation of all Cubans.

Let us give a warm welcome to our Olympic athletes in all parts of the country. Let us extol their dignity and their merits. Let us do for them everything in our power.

A gold medal for honor!


Fidel Castro Ruz

August 24, 2008

9:05 p.m.

Translated by ESTI

The Family: Africa's Blessing and Curse

The Family: Africa's Blessing and Curse


Too often Africa is seen through a prism of war and famine, but this masks its essential energy
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Swazi royal maidens, some of the 50,000 young Swazi women, gather at the Royal Palace to present their freshly cut reeds to King Mswati III as part of the annual reed dance, Mbabane, Swaziland

Part of the 50,000 Swazi Royal maidens of King Mswati III's domain presenting their freshly cut reeds during the annual reed dance

I was delighted to see my friend Siphiwe Hlophe, founder of Swaziland for Positive Living (Swapol), giving Swaziland's king hell last week. On Wednesday she led a 1,000-strong demonstration in the capital Mbabane to protest that eight of his 13 wives, plus their children and an entourage of bodyguards, maids and hangers-on, had chartered a plane to Dubai for a shopping spree.

Swaziland is a disaster zone by any definition. It has the worst HIV infection rate in the world; 31% for women. It is also pathetically poor, with nearly 70% of its people living on less than 50 US cents (about 27p) a day.

King Mswati III, whose personal take of the national budget is half the health budget, is estimated to have spent £2.2 million on the trip and is planning a huge 40th birthday bash this week. Meanwhile Siphiwe's marchers claimed that the supply of antiretroviral drugs to people living with AIDS has been halved by the royal government.

I met the formidable Siphiwe during a visit to Swaziland in 2002. Three years earlier she was thrilled when she won a national scholarship to study agriculture in Britain. One of the conditions of the scholarship was an Aids test, which she took, unaware there was a problem. She was HIV-positive.

As a result she lost the scholarship, and her husband, who had probably infected her, walked out.

She thought she was going to die and went into deep depression. Then she decided that before she died she would make a difference. She joined up with other women living with HIV and formed Swapol. I went with her and her friends, singing and dancing and laughing as they strode up a steep hill to bring food and comfort to orphaned children, a swaggering triumphant gang of very angry women.

The ridiculous, English public-school- educated monarch is not typical of Africa these days, but he escapes censure because, in a twisted, debased way, he represents something from the past. Having a big family remains important in Africa and its population is doubling in every generation. Like the Swazi king, many men who can afford it -- and some that cannot -- have several wives and lots of children.

The aim in Africa was always to add more people to the family group. In contrast, European families shed people. Traditionally, in Europe, when a daughter married and left her family, she was given a dowry, a pay-off to settle her elsewhere. In Africa the money goes the other way. A suitor must pay bride price -- compensation for the loss of a family member. He is not just ensuring, since she is valuable, that she will be respected and treated well, he is also binding their families together, adding more people to his own household.

Perhaps this is because European societies had too many people and not enough land, whereas in Africa there was always plenty of land but not enough people to control it. In crowded, bloody Europe people stood and fought for land. In Africa wars were fought for pillage, for slaves, for cattle, for control of trade. Very rarely did people fight for land. It was not necessary. There was always plenty of space. And when there were wars, the defeated were not usually slaughtered or driven away, they were absorbed into the victor's group.

Family is central to life in Africa, but the African family is nothing like the neat nuclear family of Europe. Africans find the European family a paltry, cold affair. In Africa -- the whole of Africa -- the family extends to relations Europeans would no longer have any knowledge of. A man without a family is no one. He is nothing.

When I first arrived in Africa as a teacher I was continually confused by the way people referred to their families. One of my students told me he lived in a house with three fathers and two mothers. "But you have only one father and one mother," I told him. "No, I have three fathers and two mothers at our house," he replied.

People often introduced me to three or four people they called their mother or father. In Africa any relative of your parents' age who looks after you as a child is a mother or a father. Even cousins several times removed are called brothers and sisters. And Africa is a good place to grow old. Grey hairs are respected and obeyed. The elderly are not pushed aside as they are in western countries.

However, there are downsides to family ties and respect for age. The downside of the family is that distant relatives can claim from richer members. Any money that one member earns is expected to be distributed throughout the rest of the extended family. It is hard to build a family business under such conditions. And age has its drawbacks too. One reason

President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa has found it hard to dictate to Robert Mugabe is because he is from a younger generation. Dynamic leaders of 50 are told they are too young to rule. They need to have some grey hairs. The old retain power over their families -- and their countries -- until they die. Young upstarts are soon seen off by their elders and betters.

The only young African leaders to come to power in Africa seized it by force.

Swaziland also has a lesson for those who believe Africa's problems are all about "tribe" -- the ultimate extended family. It is one of only four of the continent's countries that are based on a single ethnic group.

Of the others, one is Botswana, Africa's most stable and best run country. Another is Somalia, the ultimate failed state. So no pattern there. In Swaziland the king and the ruling elite refer to the Swazi nation but pretend that Swazis are a traditional tribe, utterly obedient to the king and his chiefs. The king misuses tradition to appropriate the country's meagre resources, prevent development and keep the people subservient.

What is the difference between a tribe and a nation anyway? Tribalism describes a frame of mind all human beings suffer from: a pig-headed "my group, right or wrong" attitude. In Africa people are always referred to as members of tribes, but how can 25m Yoruba or 33m Hausa people be called tribes? If they are, then surely the English, Welsh and Scots must be British tribes. As a journalist, I refuse to use the word tribe in Africa until the media refer to former Yugoslavia as tribal or the Israel-Palestine conflict as a land dispute between two semitic tribes. That's how it would be described if they lived in Africa.

Africa's problem is not tribalism as such, but the utterly incoherent nation states cohabited by different ethnic groups bequeathed to Africans half a century ago. Africans had no part in the creation of their nation states. At the end of the 19th century, Europeans drew lines on maps of places they had never been to. Fifty years ago the filled-in spaces became Ghana, Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea and Gabon, countries that had never existed before. Suddenly pitched into independence, they had no sense of common nationhood. By contrast the ruling Europeans had always emphasised ethnic differences and suppressed any sense of nationalism.

Today Ghanaians are proudly Ghanaian and Kenyans fiercely Kenyan, but they lack a common sense of what that means. Beneath the surface of Africa's weak nation states lie old cultures, old communities, very different societies with their own laws and languages. Nigeria contains some 400 different ethnic groups. Uganda has more than 40. They lack what we take for granted: a common conception of nationhood and national citizenship.

The unification of Africa remains a distant dream, and separatism is frowned on because it could lead to bloody disintegration. There is no alternative to the long, tricky and sometimes bloody process of establishing political systems that contain and manage these historic differences.

Richard Dowden's book Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles is published by Portobello Books next month

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s. e. anderson is author of "The Black Holocaust for Beginners"
Social Activism is not a hobby: it's a Lifestyle lasting a Lifetime
http://www.blackedu cator.org
http://blackeducato r.blogspot.com

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