Türkiye: No Capitalists are Workers’ Friends here ♦ Nigeria: Elections, Crisis and Imperialist Conflict here ♦
Türkiye, US, NATO, Russia: No Capitalists Are Friends of the Working Class. Workers and Soldiers Key to Communist Revolution
March 4— “Take your dirty hands off of Türkiye,” its interior minister told the US ambassador in February.
“They will pay a high price” if they close their consulates, said Türkiye’s President Erdogan.
“Türkiye’s ‘two-faced sultan’ (President Erdogan) is no friend of the West. It’s time to get tough,” wrote Guardian commentator Simon Tisdall the next day. Tisdall advocates “regime change” as a political and military tool of Western bloc countries.
What’s going on?
On the face of it, all this rhetoric is about disputes over Islamophobia in Europe and Türkiye’s repression of Kurdish opposition.
But the real deal is not hard to find. Also in February, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen threatened the Turkish bosses with sanctions and even withholding access to the largest G7 markets, if they continued to help Russia.
Türkiye is strategically located between NATO and Russia/China. Geographically it is the crossroads of southeast Europe and southwest Asia. The Strait of Bosphorus is the passage from the Black Sea (home of the main Russian naval fleets) to the Mediterranean Sea.
Türkiye hosts NATO’s Land Command (LANDCOM) and a radar base within NATO’s Ballistic Missile Defense. European Union countries are among its largest trading partners, but Türkiye has, since 1989, been denied entry to the EU for a variety of reasons ranging from its human rights violations to Europe’s Islamophobia.
Economic relations between Türkiye and Russia have grown by 800% in the last year. Due to the US/NATO embargo on Russian oil, the Turkish bosses are buying that oil cheaply and selling it to Europe. The export of chemicals and microchips to Russia to be used in the war in Ukraine has multiplied. At the same time, Russians are the majority of tourists in Turkey, one of its main sources of currency.
US imperialism is weakening in the face of the Russian and Chinese imperialists. This contradiction makes the capitalist rulers of countries like Türkiye, Brazil, India, and South Africa challenge them and try to get the most out of them.
To avoid the control of the dollar-based banking system, Türkiye is using alternative payments in lira (Türkiye), rupee (India), RMB (China), and rubles (Russia).
Another reason for US/NATO discontent with Türkiye is its interest in the Kurdish oil areas on its borders and in Syria. Currently, the contradiction between Türkiye and Russia in the civil war in Syria has faded into the background.
In 2019, Türkiye was removed from the program to acquire modern US F-35 warplanes, due to its purchase of Russian S-400 surface-to-air missiles. The Turkish armed forces are bringing out their first aircraft carrier that will use locally produced drones instead of F-35s.
In these capitalist/imperialist struggles the working class has nothing to gain and everything to lose. Contradictions between capitalists accelerate global military confrontations and brutal attacks on the working class. But the critical point is that capitalist rulers depend on their workers and soldiers. We urgently need to bring the alternative of communist revolution to these masses of workers and the armed forces.
A Red Flag reader in Los Angeles, USA said, “What is happening with Türkiye? I want Russia to win.” We responded, “No imperialist or capitalist is a friend of the working class. Join our alternative, that of the communist revolution.”
Elections, Economic Crisis, and Imperialist Conflict in Nigeria
March 1— “My family is from Nigeria. My father says things are bad there now,” said a student in the USA.
There has been a lot of tension and fear around the Nigerian elections that began on February 25 and resulted in the election of establishment politico Bola Tinubo as president.
This wave of fear and tension caused a comrade’s relative to postpone a trip from the US to see family in Nigeria. They had saved and planned for this trip and took time off from work to enjoy it. The children of another family member in Nigeria are out of school indefinitely. The schools had planned to close for four days, but now, the family must wait to hear from the headmaster.
Capitalism and imperialism have caused this crisis that disrupts the masses’ lives.
The outgoing president’s decision to print new currency did not surprise most citizens. When the banks returned only debit cards in place of actual banknotes, the people most affected were understandably upset.
Nigeria is full of small businesses and cottage industries that rely on actual currency. They fear trying to access real funds and being turned away. Bank employees in one city, afraid of an angry crowd of customers, got a ladder and escaped the bank through a high window!
Oil-rich Nigeria can’t get fuel to the masses because of large-scale crude oil theft and government corruption. Fuel prices have soared. Over half the population lives below the official poverty line.
Over a third of the workforce is unemployed, including more than half of young workers. Many of the 73 million unemployed young people are also frustrated about the slow development of higher education and a seven-month Twitter ban. Many are still angry that the military got away with killing over a dozen youths protesting police brutality in 2020.
Half of all Nigerians are under 18 years of age. A third of eligible voters are 18-34. The Labour Party presidential candidate Peter Obi captured their attention as a “new” political force, coming in third with 6.1 million votes. But Obi is a wealthy businessman/banker who stashes wealth in offshore tax havens. He has been a mainstream politician for decades.
Widespread violence – and justified cynicism about politicians – kept voter turnout down to 26%, the lowest since Nigeria restarted elections in 1999.
Nobody anywhere should put their trust in any capitalist politician or expect elections to improve our lives. We must organize ourselves for communist revolution to control our collective destiny.
The US Biden administration used social media to promote “getting out the vote” in Nigeria. A key player was UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, a member of the influential Council on Foreign Relations. She has served US imperialism for decades, mostly in Africa. The US, she has said, is a “close to perfect” country. Ha!
Why is the US meddling in Nigerian elections now? Probably because US and Chinese imperialists are fighting over control of Nigeria’s mineral wealth. China has recently overtaken the US as the largest foreign investor in Nigeria, the biggest economy in Africa.
Terrible conditions in Nigeria have led to mass emigration. Tens of thousands now live in South Africa, where they have been targets of xenophobia. Hundreds of thousands live in the United States.
Today’s international working class needs a communist world without borders or ethnic divisions. The seed of that future exists today within the International Communist Workers’ Party. Wherever we are, we must work to build communist relations with our class siblings who have been forced by capitalist crisis to migrate from their place of birth.
Lithium in Nigeria: Extraction and Politics
Shortly before the Nigerian presidential election, Twitter posts encouraged people to “enjoy the fruits of democracy.” One such poster was on the Board of Directors for the National Endowment of Democracy. The NED’s then-president said in 1991 that “a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” It has been linked to coups in South America, Africa, and elsewhere.
Nigerians should be wary of attempts by colonizer countries (imperialists) to get hold of natural resources. Political entities like the NED often cover for destabilizing governments that oppose US capitalist interests. Imperialists of all stripes back puppet dictators who allow them to take resources out of the countries. They profit from superexploiting the miners and other workers who produce the wealth.
Nigerian capitalists are trying to use the competition among imperialists to their own advantage. Extremely rich lithium deposits have been discovered in Nigeria, used for batteries for large and small electronic devices. A major US corporation approached the former Nigerian president, but that deal ended because the company did not want to build a battery factory in Nigeria. It appears that another imperialist power, China, may end up with the contract to mine lithium and to make batteries in Nigeria.
These capitalists and imperialists are fighting each other for the ability to exploit the working-class masses. Our fight is to get rid of them all!
Read the ICWP Pamphlet:
“Soldiers, Sailors and Marines: Crucial to Communist Workers’ Revolution”
Front page of this issue
