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Somalia, Djibouti, Yemen: Flashpoints of Imperialist War
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- 09 December 2016 38 hits
As competition between imperialist superpowers China and the U.S. intensifies in the Horn of Africa, bomber-in-chief Barack Obama has laid the capitalist legal basis for a wider oil war in Somalia. The resulting devastation of the working class shows, more than ever, that we need communist revolution.
Oil Chokepoint: Bab el-Mandeb
Off the western flank of the Arabian Sea, the U.S. is hard-pressed to keep control over the oil shipment chokepoint at the strait of Bab el-Mandeb. The strait separates Djbouti and Yemen, between the Persian Gulf and the Suez Canal. Nearly four million barrels of oil pass through it every day (Business Insider, 11/3): “[H]e who controls Bab el-Mandeb has his fingers around the throats of both the EU and Asia’s economies” (Counterpunch, 11/17/11).
This area is of longtime geopolitical importance for U.S. hegemony. In 1991, the U.S. Army War College published an unclassified study that called Bab Al-Mandeb “a confrontation arena between the superpowers, which tried to establish and then promote their military presence and influence there.”
In the 1990s, the main U.S. rival in the area was Russia. Today it is China.
Somalia: From Bombs to Ground Operations
Somalia’s working class is caught in the crossfire of the imperialists’ fight to control Middle East oil. Barack Obama has expanded a mandate for war against Al Qaeda to include Somalia, a precedent that president-elect Donald Trump will be free to escalate (NYT, 11/28). As Obama rains bombs on Somalia and murders masses of workers, the scope of the operation is expanding. According to official statistics, the number of U.S. Special Operations forces on the ground has climbed from 120 in 2007 to 300 (Reuters 7/14). The tempo of their rampage has increased to six raids a month (Telesurtv, 10/16). After conducting a covert operation until 2014, Obama has folded these raids into the perpetual war waged under the post-9/11 “Authorization for the Use of Force.”
While the future of this conflict is unpredictable, U.S. bosses will need many more ground troops to hold off its imperialist rivals.
History of Imperialist Carnage
Imperialist designs on the Horn of Africa date back to the nineteenth century. Through occupations by British, French, Italian, Russian, and U.S. forces, the impact on workers has been the same: capitalist exploitation, instability, periodic famine. In 2006, after U.S.-backed warlords in Somalia were defeated by a group called the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), U.S. imperialism supported an Ethiopian invasion. As the ICU splintered, a faction called the Shabab emerged. Aligned with Al Qaeda, it became the main anti-U.S. force on the ground These little terrorists seek to impose their own brand of capitalist exploitation on the local working class, different only in scale from the big terrorists of U.S. imperialism.
In 2010, U.S.-fomented instability and outright slaughter have combined with drought to bring famine to Somalia. At least 250,000 workers and children have starved to death. Tony Lake, UNICEF director and Clinton-era national security advisor, budgeted ten cents per person a day to feed our class brothers and sisters through this crisis, a death warrant signed by a trusted henchman of U.S. imperialism (telesur.net 9/11/16).
Djibouti: New Scramble for the Horn
A rising China looms as the main threat to U.S. imperialism, and to U.S. control of Bab el-Mandeb in particular. The Chinese imperialists are building their first overseas military outpost in Djibouti, a tiny nation between Somalia, Eritrea, and Ethiopia. The Chinese base is eight miles from the only acknowledged permanent U.S. military base in Africa (WSJ, 8/19).
Dijoubti represents the latest example of China’s pivot toward Africa. Beyond the $200 billion spent on the continent in 2012, surpassing the U.S., China has pledged to invest $1 trillion by 2025 (CNN Money, 12/5/15). Chinese President Xi Jinping openly refers to the Djibouti base as a key in defending Chinese interests in Middle East oil fields. Xi’s top naval officers consider “steadily advancing overseas base construction” a top priority for Chinese capitalist (WSJ, 8/19). As the U.S. prepares for a wider ground war, direct clashes with China are a growing possibility.
Yemen: Obama’s War
Another country caught in the superpowers’ crossfire is Yemen, across Bab el- Mandeb from Djibouti and bordering Saudi Arabia to the south. Yemen is being torn apart in a proxy war between the Iran-backed Houthi rebels and the pro-Saudi/U.S. regime. A Saudi-led coalition has conducted indiscriminate air strikes across the country, killing thousands of workers. For the imperialists, the stakes are high; Saudi Arabia contains the world’s largest reserves of cheaply extracted oil. Obama and the finance capitalists he serves fear any threat to U.S. control over the world’s foremost profit center.
Fight for Communism
In years past, millions of workers and students looked to communism in their struggles against imperialism, colonialism, and capitalist exploitation in the Horn of Africa and beyond. Nationalism led these fighters down a dead end. Progressive Labor Party is proud to carry forward the banner of the struggle against imperialism and rebuild proletarian internationalism. Let the imperialists start their wars—the workers can and will finish them with communist revolution! We have nothing to lose but our chains!
Half a million deaths, seven million refugees, and one country-turned-wasteland later, Russia and the U.S. are reportedly discussing a deal with the Aleppo rebels in Syria. These U.S.-backed, Al Qaeda-aligned forces have proven unable to defeat the Russia-backed government of President Bashar al-Assad. But Assad and his murderous regime were never what the cataclysmic war in Syria was primarily about. The real conflict is over oil and imperialist dominance.
U.S. and Russia at War
What does the U.S. want from Syria?
The U.S. wants to install a puppet regime in Damascus [Syria’s capital]…[to] secure pipeline corridors in the East, oversee the transport of vital energy reserves from Qatar to the EU, and make sure those reserves continue to be denominated in U.S. Dollars that are recycled into U.S. Treasuries and U.S. financial assets. This is the basic recipe for maintaining U.S. dominance in the Middle East and for extending America’s imperial grip on global power into the future (Counterpunch, 9/16).
The Russian oil bosses, of course, have a different agenda. The proxy war in Syria is not the first to be fought over pipelines. The TAPI pipeline triggered the 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan—and the death and displacement of hundreds of thousands of workers. The proposed Qatar-Turkey pipeline, rejected by Assad in 2009, would have challenged Russia’s domination. Shortly thereafter, CIA began funding opposition groups in Syria.
Russians, who sell 70 percent of their gas exports to Europe, viewed the Qatar/Turkey pipeline as an existential threat. In Putin’s view, the Qatar pipeline is a NATO plot to…deprive Russia of its only foothold in the Middle East, strangle the Russian economy and end Russian leverage in the European energy market…
—Ecowatch, (2/25)
Imperialists Dig their Own Graves
The bosses’ media has used anti-Muslim and Anti-Arab racism to paint Syria as another endless conflict between Muslim sects. To protect their profits, the imperialists use sectarian politics to commit racist and sexist horrors against the working class. As in Afghanistan, the U.S. strategy to fund Islamic nationalist groups in Syria is backfiring. One capitalist solution births the next capitalist crisis—in this case, ISIS.
The only solution is communism, a world without profit, war, and religious divisions. The working class is fighting back in Syria, Afghanistan, and throughout the Middle East. Progressive Labor Party is seeking to grow in these critical areas, and to turn the guns around for an egalitarian world.
STANDING ROCK, December 4 — After months of protest, thousands of courageous, multiracial fighters forced a small concession from the Obama administration. The Army Corp of Engineers decided to deny the permit to complete the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). But the oil billionaires behind DAPL and their politician puppets are already vowing to finish the pipeline.
The victory in this struggle is the fighting ethos, cooperation, and class-consciousness that have developed in the protesters’ camp. As some leaders are telling the protesters to go home, many are staying. Join the Progressive Labor Party in the lifelong struggle for an egalitarian, communist world without racism and sexism.
Racism, Oil Pipeline Threaten Indigenous Workers’ Water
DAPL was rerouted because it was too close to water sources near the mostly-white city of Bismarck, North Dakota. Because of racism, it was rerouted under the Missouri River near the Sioux Reservation, potentially ruining the water supply for thousands of indigenous workers. Businesses and the U.S. government have been devastating reservation lands for decades by dumping nuclear and chemical waste. Whether at Standing Rock or Flint, Michigan, the bosses kill workers with poisoned water or radioactive material. Pipeline leaks are routine. And so, thousands of protesters began setting up camps in to block DAPL.
Cultivating Communist Values
These courageous fighters faced fascist conditions and countless brutal attacks by the Morton County Sheriff’s Department. Within the main camp, you see the DAPL floodlights, and police drones circling overhead 24 hours a day. On Thanksgiving weekend, protesters attempted to remove a barricade in the middle of the road. The militarized police attacked with tear gas, concussion grenades, rubber bullets, and water cannons in below freezing temperatures. Over 167 were injured and one young woman almost lost her arm from a concussion grenade.
One victory of this struggle was the communist values realized in the camp. A PLP comrade at Standing Rock said:
It felt like communism because the interactions aren’t premised on what I can get from you but on how I help your wellbeing, and there was an understanding that this would be reciprocated. Everyone knew that feeding one person was also nourishing the collective, because they would be able to help the camp in other ways by putting that energy into the struggle. People willing to work for the wellbeing of the collective with no money incentive sustained the camp. Whether you were working in the kitchen, the medic tents, the art collective, or chopping wood, it was clear that you were working so that the struggle could continue moving forward. That was motivation enough.
At the end of a long day of work in freezing temperatures, you could expect to be invited to eat a communal meal with workers you’d just met that day. People were genuinely happy and willing to work hard for the betterment of the entire camp. In times of struggle, we come closer to communistic practices. Experiences like these help me see that the world PLP is fighting for is possible.
Losing Strategies
In the face of massive government violence, spirituality, non-violence and negotiating with politicians are losing strategies. They are prominent parts of the NoDAPL movement, led largely by tribal “Elders.” These strategies will not stop the pipeline and will not end the violent capitalist system. The bosses and their government clearly do not care how many workers live or die.
Now the tribal chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux wants to end the protests: “’I’m asking them to go,” Dave Archambault III told Reuters, saying that the Obama administration ‘did the right thing,’ and that he hoped to ‘educate the incoming administration’ of President-elect Donald Trump” (NPR, 12/6).
The thousands of workers involved in this courageous fightback are told to go home. PLP fights for a mass Party where all workers are involved in making decisions and providing leadership. We don’t rely on a few leaders or “Elders” of the tribes.
Smash All Borders
Another inspiring part of the fightback at Standing Rock is that it is multiracial. Workers from all over the world have come to fight. They understand that these attacks are similar to attacks all workers face under capitalism. Everyone should have access to clean drinking water. However, the struggle is limited by the identity politics that make the fight an “indigenous fight.” This prevents us from uniting as a class. From the protesters at DAPL, to the refugees in Syria, to the iPhone factory workers in China, we are all part of the same struggle.
Fighting for the right of indigenous tribes to own land is a dead end. Drawing more borders cannot liberate the working class. Only the bosses have “self-determination” under capitalism. Regardless of historical treaties and agreements, the Standing Rock reservation has never had actual autonomy from U.S. state power. Making this an “indigenous fight” abandons the fight of Black, white, Asian, and Latin workers who are also terrorized and oppressed by capitalism. PLP fights for a world with no borders where all workers can live and work together.
Need Communism
The Army Corp of Engineers has put the current DAPL plans on hold, but the capitalist owners and their politician stooges have vowed to push it through to completion. But it is impossible to build the pipeline without crossing a body of water. Whether it is a water source that supplies indigenous, Black, white, Asian, or Latin workers, we still need to fight against DAPL and all other capitalist threats to our class. We cannot be fooled into thinking that the capitalists have given up, and we cannot give up either. We must build for a communist revolution to get rid of the violent capitalist system once and for all. The world we want is possible if we fight for it. Join us in fighting for a communism!
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MTA Worker: “All these Rules Are Written in Blood!”
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- 09 December 2016 38 hits
NEW YORK CITY, November 20—NYC Transit bosses are guilty of murder, and the transit workers’ union leader is guilty of helping them get away it.
On November 3, train conductor Louis Gray was struck and killed by a subway train in Brooklyn. Another worker, Jeffrey Fleming, was badly injured. They were setting up warning lights for a construction zone when a train came around a curve and pinned them. Louis was the fourth worker killed on the tracks in the last 10 years, but there have been countless injuries and near misses. A woman worker recently lost her arm when she tripped and touched the third rail. The blood of these workers and anyone hurt before or in the future, is on the bosses’ hands.
Before the body was cold, Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100 President John Samuelsen defended the racist MTA bosses and called this murder a “perfect-storm.” He said the operator and the track workers could not see each other because of the curve in the tracks. He said the union and MTA will create new rules for work zones with curved tracks, to which one worker responded, “All these rules are written in blood!” He said they wait until someone is killed before they address a problem that has existed for decades, like curved tracks.
Fighting Racism in all Workers’ Interests
The MTA bosses try to spend the bare minimum on pay, training and safety and claim there’s no money for better benefits, but they spend millions on overtime, that they dish out like treats, instead of hiring more workers. The bosses’ media then focuses on a few high seniority workers who make big bucks and tries to paint us as rich, lazy and greedy in order to undermine any unity with the millions of our fellow workers and students we carry to work and school every day.
The union is no better. In the last negotiations, the union sold out the not-yet-hired member, expanding the pay progression to top pay from three to five years, while giving billions to the biggest banks year after year in interest on bonds used to pay for capital projects.
Transit workers are also directly affected by the rise of racist terror, on and off the job. The sister of Eric Garner, who was killed in a NYPD choke hold in 2014, is a transit worker in TWU Local 100. And a few months ago, an off duty copy brutally assaulted a train conductor, slamming her to the ground in front of horrified passengers because the train was delayed! Yet the union leadership did not make an issue out of the attack on the conductor and gave little more than lip service to the murder of Eric Garner. A large number of white transit workers supported Trump’s anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant racism, however, we must win them to see these racist attacks are attacks on them, too. Their futures are threatened because the futures of their black and Latin co-workers are threatened.
Workers’ Power Can Cripple Bosses
On November 15, thousands of transit workers rallied to demand wage increases in their next contract. The current contract expires on January 15, and with the Trump administration about to take power on January 20, the union leaders are feeling the pressure to get what they can before the promised cuts in federal spending. (SEPTA transit workers in Philadelphia recently went on strike and CTA transit workers in Chicago are also in contract talks.) A fare increase takes affect on January 1, which will hit Black, Latin and immigrant workers and youth the hardest. Not surprisingly, the union has taken no stand against the fare hike.
Globally, transit workers have the power to bring capitalism’s daily functioning to a screeching halt. Populations and production are more concentrated in congested urban areas. Therefore, transit workers are a vital link in the profit chain of the big corporations, finance capitalists like banks, and big retail. PLP is building a base in transit under the conditions of growing fascism and spreading war. The challenges of our contract, the Trump election, and racist police terror offer both danger and opportunity for building the revolutionary communist movement among transit workers. It won’t be easy. But we have confidence in our co-workers, and will learn from them how to be better communists.
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Campus Cops’ Racism vs. Volleyball Students Spark Fightback
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- 09 December 2016 32 hits
BROOKLYN, November 22—A multiracial group of twenty-five students, teachers, and parents armed with chant sheets and signs returned to Brooklyn Tech High School where school security agents had treated the students like criminals weeks earlier. Students and members and friends of Progressive Labor Party are leading the fight against racism (see student letter, page 6). We are giving School Safety, the arm of the NYPD that criminalizes mainly Black and Latin students, a taste of what an organized and committed group can do.
NYPD Criminalizes Students
On November 1, the volleyball team from Park Slope Collegiate High School (PSC), comprised of Black, Latin, and South Asian students, arrived at Brooklyn Tech for the game that would decide their entrance into the playoffs. Immediately upon arrival, they were treated like criminals by security. The team was forced to line up against the wall. The team’s managers and supporters were not allowed into the game and were told that only people on the roster were allowed in, even though for the last ten years of playing games at the school they were never asked for rosters. One student yelled, “What, are we in prison?”
The team’s captain protested a security guard’s abuse, saying, “This is racist!” to which the security guard yelled, “Keep your opinions to yourself.” The coach overheard another security guard saying, “That’s what happens when you go shopping.” This comment was in reference to the last match the team played where a member of the team was implicated in the theft of a phone, which was immediately returned. The implicated student was not in attendance as a consequence of these events. While these students were being treated like criminals, another school, made up of mostly white students, was allowed to walk right into the gym without being checked or made to line up.
This discriminatory treatment from School Safety is part of the racism that is necessary for capitalists. Capitalists need to maintain the lie that Black and Latin kids and teens are criminals, in order to justify mass incarceration and police terror. This ideology also justifies unemployment, low wages, and homelessness, even though huge numbers of white workers suffer the same oppression. Anti-Black racism is why oppression and terrorization of Black workers is not taken as seriously as other struggles like DAPL (see front page).
Students Fight Back
That our students felt the indignity of racism while simply trying to play a game understandably angered and upset members of the volleyball team, student body, staff, parents, and alumni from Tech. Unwilling to take the racist treatment of the other team lying down, the team met with members of the student government to tell their story and asked for help in preparing a sit-in if the three agents who treated them horribly refused to apologize.
In preparation for the sit-in the captain of the team wrote a letter about the experience, which was sent to every teacher and parent in our school asking for support. Parents e-mailed and made phone calls to the principal of Brooklyn Tech and other higher ups in school safety demanding that these agents apologize to the team.
Knowing the team’s intention to have a sit-in, the principal and assistant principal of Tech greeted everyone and invited them to a meeting with the head of School Safety. The team received apologies from all three but the students were not having it. The team’s demand for an apology from the actual agents that treated them like criminals baffled the lieutenant who came to give lip service to the NYPD’s “Courtesy, Professionalism, and Respect” motto. She assumed her apology would be enough and tried to relate to the parents and students in the room by pointing out that she’s both Black and a parent. Our students and parents still weren’t having it. When the students wanted to go through with the sit-in, the Tech principal Randy J. Asher said that he wouldn’t stop the officers from arresting the team. He would rather have Black and Latin students with their hands behind their backs than being treated with simple dignity and respect.
Our school community is used to fighting back whether that be against racist budget cuts, school segregation, or school scanning that makes our students feel more like criminals than students. This fightback and the multiracial, teacher-parent-student alliance that we have built over the years has forced the powers that be to respond much faster to this incident. We have been told to expect an apology from one of the three officers any day now. If we don’t, we’re prepared to keep fighting for it.
The leadership the students have given to this fightback has been amazing. They have stood up against racism and criminalization of Black and Latin students. We are up against a segregated and therefore inherently unequal school system. This system is no accident. Capitalism needs racism to survive, by dividing white from Black and Latin students and workers so that all can be oppressed and exploited for profit. Mayors, governors, and presidents claim that Black lives matter that police brutality needs to stop; meanwhile their troops on the ground (the police) brutalize and terrorize the working class. Capitalist leaders don’t actually care about Black and Latin workers, and that is what we saw. The higher-ups were hoping that their willingness to say the right thing would satisfy us, while their agents continue doing exactly as they’re supposed to—terrorize our students.
It is a victory every time we stand up to racism. All students and workers need to be ready to take action over and over again. Racism isn’t going away as long as we have capitalism. Fighting smaller battles steels us for bigger battles ahead. We are now even more committed to the struggle against racism and students are more confident in themselves and each other. This struggle is just one more nail in the bosses’ coffin. We are one step closer to building class consciousness and one step closer to defeating capitalism. Stay tuned for more fightback!