FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM!
International Communist Workers Party
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FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM! |
International Communist Workers Party | |
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US President Obama visited Africa in July to tell leaders of the African Union (AU) that the US has more to offer them than China does. But he gave his speech in the new AU headquarters, built with Chinese money.
“Sub-Saharan Africa has quietly become the center of a struggle for influence between … the world’s chief powers: China and the United States,” financier John Burnett warned readers of U.S. News and World Report last May. “There is no overstating the stakes.” Those stakes include oil, strategic minerals and the ability to keep them from rival imperialists in a future world war.
Trade between the United States and Africa rose to a high of $142 billion in 2008, then declined to $73 billion in 2014 and is still falling. Trade between China and Africa doubled from 2010 to 2014, reaching $222 billion (22% of Africa’s total trade volume).
A growing share of China-Africa trade and investment is conducted in Chinese currency (the renminbi, or RMB). China just announced the opening of an RMB clearinghouse in South Africa to facilitate the use of the Chinese yuan instead of the US dollar.
Chinese Rulers: Capitalist-Imperialist Exploiters
China’s role in Africa has nothing to do with the international worker-to-worker solidarity that real communism builds. As Paul Krugman stated bluntly in the New York Times, “China is ruled by a party that calls itself Communist, but its economic reality is one of rapacious crony capitalism.”
Workers in Africa are rebelling against this Chinese capitalist reality.
Zambian copper miners went on strike in 2010 at the Chinese-run Collum Mine. Thirteen were injured when two managers opened fire on them. Two years later a manager was killed and another injured in a mass workers’ uprising.
Nigerian construction workers protested in 2013 against working conditions at the Chinese-run Lagos-Badagry highway construction site, where many worked seven days a week for 17000 Naira (about $86/month).
Last year 230 Mozambican construction workers went on strike in protest against beatings by their Chinese employers and poor working conditions.
No, China is not communist. It is not even a “lesser-evil” capitalist as some still think.
Real communism means that workers will collectively own and control the means of production. It will produce for the needs of the masses, not for international markets. It will engage in sharing, not trade. Real communism will abolish money instead of opening currency clearinghouses. .
Sometimes workers ask us where communism exists in the world today. We say that we are building its nucleus wherever workers are starting to mobilize around Red Flag and the International Communist Workers’ Party—in Africa, Europe, Asia and the Americas. You, and people like you, will build communism worldwide.
US Imperialist Rulers’ Response: AFRICOM
The US Africa Command (AFRICOM) was organized in 2007 and its stealthy footprint has been growing ever since. The US government publicly describes it as a limited, mainly humanitarian operation that also uses Special Ops against terrorist threats to the United States. But its previous commander described it, among insiders, as “the battlefield of tomorrow, today.”
In his recent book Tomorrow’s Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa, Nation Institute reporter Nick Turse extensively documents his argument that “the American military claims it’s not at war in Africa. But the evidence of that war and its early signs of failure are out there.”
Leading US imperialists are not entirely happy about this. Washington Post reporter Craig Whitlock suggested in 2013 that growing US involvement in Africa was a diversion from the Obama-Clinton “pivot toward Asia.” However, as Burnett said, the stakes are too high for them to draw down.
Last spring, a special report for the influential imperialist Council on Foreign Relations called for the development of a new and coherent US strategic approach to enhancing “peacekeeping operations” in Africa.
The report recommended deployment of increased “specialist contingents and capabilities” within UN operations. This would provide “firsthand knowledge of operational realities in African crisis zones.”
While rising Chinese imperialism concentrates on industrial infrastructure in sub-Saharan Africa, declining US imperialism is mainly building military infrastructure.
Workers in Africa and Everywhere Need Communism
Imperialism provokes resistance. In 2013 the governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, called China’s presence “a new form of imperialism.” Michael Sata won Zambia’s presidency in 2011 by tapping into anti-Chinese anger with talk about re-nationalizing the mines.
Workers must learn the bitter lessons of past “national liberation” and socialist movements. Many brave fighters sacrificed their lives for an illusion. The surviving workers found themselves still enchained in capitalist wage-slavery and entrapped in imperialist proxy wars. We hope that comrades will write more about this.
The only way forward is to mobilize the masses for communism. Right now that means reading, circulating, and writing for Red Flag. It means helping to develop and spread our understanding of how to build communist society. It means joining the International Communist Workers’ Party and building collectives, especially in industry and the military.
We must take advantage of the many opportunities that the brutal reign of capitalism has created everywhere. Tomorrow’s battlefield for the imperialists is our battlefield for communist workers’ revolution – starting today!
