Open Letter by Over 70 Scholars and Experts Condemns US-Backed Coup Attempt in Venezuela

"For the sake of the Venezuelan people, the region, and for the principle of national sovereignty, these international actors should instead support negotiations between the Venezuelan government and its opponents."

The United States government must cease interfering in Venezuela’s internal politics, especially for the purpose of overthrowing the country’s government.

Actions by the Trump administration and its allies in the hemisphere are almost certain to make the situation in Venezuela worse, leading to unnecessary human suffering, violence, and instability.

Venezuela’s political polarization is not new; the country has long been divided along racial and socioeconomic lines. But the polarization has deepened in recent years.

This is partly due to US support for an opposition strategy aimed at removing the government of Nicolás Maduro through extra-electoral means. While the opposition has been divided on this strategy, US support has backed hardline opposition sectors in their goal of ousting the Maduro government through often violent protests, a military coup d’etat, or other avenues that sidestep the ballot box.

Under the Trump administration, aggressive rhetoric against the Venezuelan government has ratcheted up to a more extreme and threatening level, with Trump administration officials talking of “military action” and condemning Venezuela, along with Cuba and Nicaragua, as part of a “troika of tyranny.” Problems resulting from Venezuelan government policy have been worsened by US economic sanctions, illegal under the Organization of American States and the United Nations ― as well as US law and other international treaties and conventions.

These sanctions have cut off the means by which the Venezuelan government could escape from its economic recession, while causing a dramatic falloff in oil production and worsening the economic crisis, and causing many people to die because they can’t get access to life-saving medicines. Meanwhile, the US and other governments continue to blame the Venezuelan government ― solely ― for the economic damage, even that caused by the US sanctions.

Now the US and its allies, including OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro and Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, have pushed Venezuela to the precipice.

By recognizing National Assembly President Juan Guaido as the new president of Venezuela ― something illegal under the OAS Charter ― the Trump administration has sharply accelerated Venezuela’s political crisis in the hopes of dividing the Venezuelan military and further polarizing the populace, forcing them to choose sides.

The obvious, and sometimes stated goal, is to force Maduro out via a coup d’etat.

The reality is that despite hyperinflation, shortages, and a deep depression, Venezuela remains a politically polarized country. The US and its allies must cease encouraging violence by pushing for violent, extralegal regime change.

If the Trump administration and its allies continue to pursue their reckless course in Venezuela, the most likely result will be bloodshed, chaos, and instability. The US should have learned something from its regime change ventures in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and its long, violent history of sponsoring regime change in Latin America.

Neither side in Venezuela can simply vanquish the other. The military, for example, has at least 235,000 frontline members, and there are at least 1.6 million in militias. Many of these people will fight, not only on the basis of a belief in national sovereignty that is widely held in Latin America ― in the face of what increasingly appears to be a US-led intervention ― but also to protect themselves from likely repression if the opposition topples the government by force.

In such situations, the only solution is a negotiated settlement, as has happened in the past in Latin American countries when politically polarized societies were unable to resolve their differences through elections.

There have been efforts, such as those led by the Vatican in the fall of 2016, that had potential, but they received no support from Washington and its allies who favored regime change. This strategy must change if there is to be any viable solution to the ongoing crisis in Venezuela.

For the sake of the Venezuelan people, the region, and for the principle of national sovereignty, these international actors should instead support negotiations between the Venezuelan government and its opponents that will allow the country to finally emerge from its political and economic crisis.

Signed:

Noam Chomsky, Professor Emeritus, MIT and Laureate Professor, University of Arizona

Laura Carlsen, Director, Americas Program, Center for International Policy

Greg Grandin, Professor of History, New York University

Miguel Tinker Salas, Professor of Latin American History and Chicano/a Latino/a Studies at Pomona College

Sujatha Fernandes, Professor of Political Economy and Sociology, University of Sydney

Steve Ellner, Associate Managing Editor of Latin American Perspectives

Alfred de Zayas, former UN Independent Expert on the Promotion of a Democratic and Equitable International Order and only UN rapporteur to have visited Venezuela in 21 years

Boots Riley, Writer/Director of Sorry to Bother You, Musician

John Pilger, Journalist & Film-Maker

Mark Weisbrot, Co-Director, Center for Economic and Policy Research

Jared Abbott, PhD Candidate, Department of Government, Harvard University

Dr. Tim Anderson, Director, Centre for Counter Hegemonic Studies

Elisabeth Armstrong, Professor of the Study of Women and Gender, Smith College

Alexander Aviña, PhD, Associate Professor of History, Arizona State University

Marc Becker, Professor of History, Truman State University

Medea Benjamin, Cofounder, CODEPINK

Phyllis Bennis, Program Director, New Internationalism, Institute for Policy Studies

Dr. Robert E. Birt, Professor of Philosophy, Bowie State University

Aviva Chomsky, Professor of History, Salem State University

James Cohen, University of Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle

Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, Associate Professor, George Mason University

Benjamin Dangl, PhD, Editor of Toward Freedom

Dr. Francisco Dominguez, Faculty of Professional and Social Sciences, Middlesex University, UK

Alex Dupuy, John E. Andrus Professor of Sociology Emeritus, Wesleyan University

Jodie Evans, Cofounder, CODEPINK

Vanessa Freije, Assistant Professor of International Studies, University of Washington

Gavin Fridell, Canada Research Chair and Associate Professor in International Development Studies, St. Mary’s University

Evelyn Gonzalez, Counselor, Montgomery College

Jeffrey L. Gould, Rudy Professor of History, Indiana University

Bret Gustafson, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Washington University in St. Louis

Peter Hallward, Professor of Philosophy, Kingston University

John L. Hammond, Professor of Sociology, CUNY

Mark Healey, Associate Professor of History, University of Connecticut

Gabriel Hetland, Assistant Professor of Latin American, Caribbean and U.S. Latino Studies, University of Albany

Forrest Hylton, Associate Professor of History, Universidad Nacional de Colombia-Medellín

Daniel James, Bernardo Mendel Chair of Latin American History

Chuck Kaufman, National Co-Coordinator, Alliance for Global Justice

Daniel Kovalik, Adjunct Professor of Law, University of Pittsburgh

Winnie Lem, Professor, International Development Studies, Trent University

Dr. Gilberto López y Rivas, Professor-Researcher, National University of Anthropology and History, Morelos, Mexico

Mary Ann Mahony, Professor of History, Central Connecticut State University

Jorge Mancini, Vice President, Foundation for Latin American Integration (FILA)

Luís Martin-Cabrera, Associate Professor of Literature and Latin American Studies, University of California San Diego

Teresa A. Meade, Florence B. Sherwood Professor of History and Culture, Union College

Frederick Mills, Professor of Philosophy, Bowie State University

Stephen Morris, Professor of Political Science and International Relations, Middle Tennessee State University

Liisa L. North, Professor Emeritus, York University

Paul Ortiz, Associate Professor of History, University of Florida

Christian Parenti, Associate Professor, Department of Economics, John Jay College CUNY

Nicole Phillips, Law Professor at the Université de la Foundation Dr. Aristide Faculté des Sciences Juridiques et Politiques and Adjunct Law Professor at the University of California Hastings College of the Law

Beatrice Pita, Lecturer, Department of Literature, University of California San Diego

Margaret Power, Professor of History, Illinois Institute of Technology

Vijay Prashad, Editor, The TriContinental

Eleanora Quijada Cervoni FHEA, Staff Education Facilitator & EFS Mentor, Centre for Higher Education, Learning & Teaching at The Australian National University

Walter Riley, Attorney and Activist

William I. Robinson, Professor of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara

Mary Roldan, Dorothy Epstein Professor of Latin American History, Hunter College/ CUNY Graduate Center

Karin Rosemblatt, Professor of History, University of Maryland

Emir Sader, Professor of Sociology, University of the State of Rio de Janeiro

Rosaura Sanchez, Professor of Latin American Literature and Chicano Literature, University of California, San Diego

T.M. Scruggs Jr., Professor Emeritus, University of Iowa

Victor Silverman, Professor of History, Pomona College

Brad Simpson, Associate Professor of History, University of Connecticut

Jeb Sprague, Lecturer, University of Virginia

Kent Spriggs, International human rights lawyer

Christy Thornton, Assistant Professor of History, Johns Hopkins University

Sinclair S. Thomson, Associate Professor of History, New York University

Steven Topik, Professor of History, University of California, Irvine

Stephen Volk, Professor of History Emeritus, Oberlin College

Kirsten Weld, John. L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences, Department of History, Harvard University

Kevin Young, Assistant Professor of History, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Patricio Zamorano, Academic of Latin American Studies; Executive Director, InfoAmericas

Source: Open Democracy

South Africa after the Marikana massacre

The police massacre of striking miners at Marikana is a watershed for post-apartheid South Africa and for the international class struggle.

It demonstrates in the starkest form imaginable that the perspective of “black empowerment” and the “National Democratic Revolution” providing the basis for overcoming economic and social oppression has failed utterly. The central lesson of Marikana is that the fundamental division within society is class, not race.

The African National Congress, having come to power in 1994 as a result of immense sacrifice and revolutionary struggle by millions of workers, has revealed itself to be every bit as ruthless as its white predecessors in enforcing the most brutal exploitation on behalf of the major global corporations.

The ANC sent in the police to shoot, kill and maim striking workers whose sole crime was to fight for the right to live as human beings and not beasts of burden. Now, after the police have killed 36 and wounded another 78, some 270 imprisoned strikers are being charged with the murder and attempted murder of their colleagues under Apartheid-era “common purpose” laws designed to blame the victims for “provoking” police violence.

The Marikana miners are paid less than $500 a month for living in squalid communal huts and working in hazardous, back-breaking conditions for the UK-based Lonmin, extracting platinum that sells for over $1,400 an ounce. Their fate, worse still, is shared by millions in what has now become the most unequal country in the entire world.

Meanwhile the ANC has spawned a grasping layer of black bourgeois, with a reputation for unparalleled corruption and repression. It is synonymous with terms like Black Economically Empowered (BEE) companies and “tenderpreneurs”—those who have enriched themselves by acting as front-men for the transnational corporations or who have used their control of the state apparatus to secure a direct role in exploiting the working class.

Even as charges were being brought against the arrested miners, South African Minister of Mining Susan Shabangu was reassuring “our investors, incumbent and prospective” at a gathering of mining executives in Perth, Australia, that President Jacob Zuma is “determined to isolate bad elements in our society.”

The ANC in turn relies upon its partners in the Tripartite Alliance—the South African Communist Party and the COSATU trade union federation—to impose the dictatorship of global capital and the South African bourgeoisie upon an increasingly restive population.

The Stalinist SACP insisted throughout the struggle against apartheid that black majority rule of a capitalist South Africa was a necessary stage in an eventual transition to socialism. It has portrayed COSATU as a bastion of working class power within government that would guarantee this transformation.

Events have proceeded in an entirely opposite direction. For services rendered, SACP leaders were granted key roles in the post-apartheid regime and a share in the spoils of office. COSATU and its affiliated unions have functioned as an industrial police force and a mechanism for the self-enrichment of the bureaucracy.

Philip Hirschsohn, Professor School of Business and Finance at the University of the Western Cape, pointed out last year how the trade unions have taken on “oligarchic characteristics.”

The position of shop steward has become a mechanism for securing management positions, as part of the “emergence of entrepreneurial and career unionists,” with SACP membership a favoured “stepping stone” for “access opportunities in managerial ranks or in government.”

Former NUM leader and high-ranking ANC politician, Cyril Ramaphosa is now the 34th richest man in the whole of Africa, with a net worth of $275 million. One of his many companies has a contract to supply labour at Marikana in a form of indentured slavery. He is paid R12 000 ($1500) per worker per month by Lonmin, but only pays his workers R4000 ($500) per month.

Its role as an adjunct of management has meant that NUM membership has declined to less than 50 percent of employees in many mines; most of these are skilled white collar and surface workers. The strikers at Marikana are either members of the breakaway Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU) or not unionized at all.

The NUM, COSATU and the SACP have all called for police to clamp down on the strikers, defending the massacre and urging the suppression of the AMCU. NUM General Secretary Frans Baleni said of the Marikana massacre that, “The police were patient, but these people were extremely armed with dangerous weapons.”

This has not prevented the pseudo-left groups internationally from opposing the necessary break from COSATU and its affiliated unions, without which any struggle against the ANC is impossible.

The South African affiliates of the Committee for a Workers International, the Democratic Socialist Movement, instead urge “workers in both unions to demand united solidarity action, beginning with a local general strike” and ending in a “national general strike”—all presumably led by the NUM and COSATU.

The Socialist Workers Party in the UK is more despicable still, writing on August 17, “Whatever its intentions, AMCU has sometimes been used to introduce disunity at a time when workers face big challenges. It would have been better for the workers who formed the rival union to fight among the NUM rank and file and shift its policies from below.”

Support for the NUM and COSATU is support for the ANC and the Tripartite Alliance government. It is support for the continuation of capitalism and imperialist oppression.

The theory of Permanent Revolution provides the political basis for the workers and youth of South Africa to conduct the life-and-death struggles that lie ahead. The evolution of the ANC is a graphic confirmation of Leon Trotsky’s insistence that bourgeois nationalist movements, tied as they are to capitalism and organically opposed to ending the brutal exploitation of the workers and poor farmers, are incapable of carrying through the struggle for democracy and liberation from imperialist domination.

The working class, mobilising all the oppressed rural and urban layers, must break with the ANC and its defenders in the SACP and the trade union apparatus and build their own socialist party.

A workers government must be established to take the entire economy into social ownership and utilise the vast natural wealth presently monopolised by the super-rich to meet the needs of all for decent jobs, housing, education and health provision. This revolutionary struggle must be extended throughout Africa and internationally through the construction of a section of the International Committee of the Fourth International, the world party of socialist revolution.

Chris Marsden

Source: World Wide Socialist Web Site

Poverty now a crisis in the first world: Motlanthe

The adverse impact of capitalism on social and economic growth requires a mind shift in socialism, Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe said today.

"The global crisis of capitalism and imperialism, which is negatively affecting growth, widening social inequality, increasing levels of poverty and worsening [un]employment figures, needs a sharpened, radical shift in the approach the Socialist International takes," he said in Cape Town.

Speaking at the opening of the 24th Congress of the Socialist International (SI), he said debates had to focus on the reform of the organisation. Poverty was no longer just a problem for developing nations, but also now becoming a crisis in the first world. "Therefore this leaves us with no choice but to review, analyse and rethink the impact of the global economic crisis on society and the toiling masses of the world." He said there were various concerns sociality parties needed to confront. These included a need to strive for conflict resolution, while securing conditions of development.

Motlanthe's sentiments were echoed by the SI's president and former Greek prime minister George Papandreou. Innovative and alternative solutions were needed in a changing world, he said. "This human ingenuity needs to be accompanied by political and democratic will to make these changes... That will, my friends, has been lacking in Europe and around the world."

Papandreou defended the SI's existence, saying leftist parties were important to achieve, among others, peace, justice, good governance, equality, growth and employment for all. He warned against attributing blame for the global economic crisis. "We point fingers at each other rather than reach out our hands and lift each other up."

Papandreou lamented the fact that immigrants were being held responsible for the economic troubles in several countries. He said international co-ordination was needed now more than ever. "We've seen this spectacular rise in nationalism over the years, and at the same time we've noticed a terrifying rise in racism, prejudice."

Source: Times Live

XXIV Congress of the Socialist International

The XXIV Congress of the Socialist International will take place from 30 August-1 September 2012 in Cape Town, South Africa.

The Congress, which takes place every four years, brings together heads of government, leaders and delegates from the member parties of the SI alongside invited guests. This year’s Congress will be the first in the history of the International to take place in Africa, hosted by the African National Congress (ANC).

The Congress takes place under the heading ‘For a new internationalism and a new culture of solidarity’ with its agenda focused on four key themes, which are central to the concerns of the global social democratic movement, building on our message to citizens across the globe.

The themes are as follows: (1) For an economy with jobs, growth and social protection: the social democratic response to the financial crisis; (2) The struggle for rights and freedoms: strengthening representative democracy and gaining new democracies in the world; (3) For a common road to peace, sustainability and cooperation: the need to secure multilateralism; and (4) For a new internationalism and a new culture of solidarity among people and between nations. Discussions on each of these themes will incorporate keynote addresses, panel discussions and contributions from delegates.

The Members of the Socialist International Commission for a Sustainable World Society

• Ricardo Lagos
• Göran Persson
• Hilary Benn
• Elio di Rupo
• Mohamed El Yazghi
• Sigmar Gabriel
• Aleksandr Kwasniewski
• Sergei Mironov
• Cristina Narbona
• Beatriz Paredes
• Anand Sharma
• Marina Silva 
• Martin Torrijos 
• Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma

Source: Socialist International

Knobkerries, sangoma as Lonmin workers vow to stay on hill

Striking miners vowed on Tuesday to stay at the top of a hill in Wonderkop, near Lonmin's Marikana mine, until their pay was pushed up to R12,500 a month. They claimed they were being paid R4000 per month, and those living outside the hostel R5000. "We want money. We have kids to take care of," said one worker, Alfred Makhaya, from the Eastern Cape.

He had been working for Lonmin for over eight years and was being paid R4000 a month. He was forced to leave the hostel to rent a room so he could have an extra R1000. "This money is too little, I am working hard and I'm being paid so little." He said if he was not going to be paid R12,500 per month, his children would end up being thieves, because he would be unable to pay for their education. Another worker, Lichaba Pafkalasi from Lesotho, said the R12,500 would enable him to support his family. He claimed the mine's staff shot at him at the weekend, killing two of his group.

They then decided to move to the mountain to discuss their next move. They claimed the mines sent the police to shoot them.

Earlier, about 500 men gathered on top of the mountain, armed with knobkerries and iron rods. Local residents said an inyanga (herbalist) or sangoma (traditional healer) would perform a ritual on the mountain top and sprinkle the men with muti (traditional medicine) to "make them brave". Nine people -- two police officers, two security guards, three protesters and two other men -- have been killed during protests at the mine, which began on Friday.

Source: Times Live

The death of co-operatives - and the birth of mass consumer debt

Last year's riots in London saw the burning down of 'Union Point', the symbolic heart of the English co-operative movement. One year on, Aaron Peters asks what the destruction of this building, provoked by the forces of mass consumption, reveals about the history of 'working class solidarity'.

Eighteenth-century dockers founded the first co-operative flour mills in Woolwich and Chatham, and the grain shortages of the Napoleonic wars helped to spread the idea. Forming a co-operative simply meant that the dockers each owned a share of the mill, and controlled it by an elected committee. The decisions, as well as the finances, were in the control of the consumers, and the middleman was left out.

Both as a method of undermining state power and of finding escape from the world of competition, the co-operative movement expanded from mills to shops. The surplus from such stores funded education and recreation. Women in particular pushed the co-operative movement forward. By 1914, the Women's Co-operative movement had 30,000 members. The English Co-operative Wholesale Society had sales amounting to £4.5 million in 1883.

By 1900, it was, taken as a whole, one of the larger companies in the world. The Socialist Co-operative Federation was running stores in Battersea, Chelsea and Tottenham; their supporters included William Morris who, at this time, as well as writing 'Socialism From The Root Up' and acting as treasurer of the Socialist League, penned 'The Dream of John Ball', his ode to the Peasant's Rising of 1381.

Alf Barnes MP thought the Great War had moved along co-operative societies everywhere, the war having, in his own words, 'burned down the painted transformation scenery of the pre-war political stage’. Economic and social relations had been thrown into the foreground of the political arena. Food prices were soaring in the post-war climate, with Co-operative Party members leading the way in taking the Conservative government head on. In the miners' strikes of the 1920s, co-operative societies up and down the country acted as the material and financial support for many strikers and their families, ultimately leading to over a million pounds of debt by the end of 1926 - debt owed by immiserated miners. A year before, the campaigning efforts of the Co-operative Party in politics had already fallen flat. Corporations holding the monopolies which were curbing co-operatively owned businesses' ability to thrive had been taken on - and soundly backed up in a Royal commission. Falling gold prices, the public were informed, were the reason for high bread prices, not monopolies.

However, as the Labour Representation Committee, building on the strike of '26, finally reached parliamentary victory in 1929, things were looking up for co-operative socialists and trade unionists alike. In celebration of the leaps and bounds the co-operative movement was taking, however crippled by debt, the head of the London Co-operative Society, Alf Barnes, oversaw the construction of a grand new headquarters for that organisation replete with a lavish co-operative department store in Tottenham, named 'Union Point'.

The construction of bravado was in vain. By 1933, the Labour Party, aware that the co-operative movement was weighing down its coat tails, introduced taxes on the bank's reserves. After the war, the Co-operative society slowly crumbled. While its newfound position as a bank gave it credibility to move into debt speculation, the retail arm dwindled. By the early 1960s, the London society faced an existential crisis. In the 1980s, the department stores closed down. By the early 1990s, the ground floor of the building was given over to the kind of monopolistic supply chains which the society had always railed against. Allied Carpets and Doors, and later Carpet Right, proudly blazoned their signage across Tottenham High Road.

In 2003, the upper floors of the building were bought out by the Metropolitan Housing Association, which had been founded in 1963 by the wife of the Governor of Jamaica to provide housing for the Windrush generation in Tottenham and Brixton. In 1988, it pioneered the new 'shared ownership’ schemes. The private finance schemes into which the housing associations had been thrust by Thatcher's administration were now put to the use of encouraging a further section of the working class into mortgage ownership. In 2009, the MHA became the National HomeBuy Agent, i.e. the overall manager of all shared ownership schemes - i.e. the national manager of 'social housing' debt.

On August 11th 2011, the Union Point building was burnt down. Thousands of residents of Tottenham and Edmonton charged through Tottenham High Street. Debt and deferred wages, combined with the lack of any state-resource to enforce austerity measures save for the single glorious mechanism of the police, were visited back upon the building which had for decades monitored the transformation of consumer co-operation into a mass consumer debt economy.

Did the Union Point building expect to be destroyed? The co-operative movement was a force of consumer ethics, running alongside the trade union movement, and running weakly. The co-operative movement proposed a mode of consumption based around working class identity and solidarity, counter-posed to a form of consumption which has come to be known simply as 'mass consumption', that is, consumption by the 'mass worker'. The conflict between different modes of consumption is tied up with methods of social reproduction in the destruction of this building. In 2011, this monument to working class consumption as a political act gave way to destructive technologies as old as - but no newer than - petroleum.

Source: Open Democracy

Spiking grain prices raise specter of global food crisis

Global food prices rose 6.2 percent in July, the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization reported Thursday. The FAO said it released its Food Price Index ahead of its regular publication schedule as a warning against the impact of such price rises.

The index, which calculates the cost of a basket of food commodities, overall averaged 213 points in July, up 12 points from June. In February 2011, the height of the Arab Spring, the overall index peaked at 238. The index has remained above the average 2008 level for more than a year and is now trending toward an all-time high.

Grain prices have driven the overall rise. The US corn crop is in a state of disaster, with more than half of all US acreage listed in poor or very poor condition due to a record-breaking drought. Under a parallel drought, Russia downgraded its wheat crop by several million tons on Wednesday.

The FAO cereal index averaged 260 points in July, up 17 percent over the month. Most of the increase is attributable to a 23 percent rise in corn prices over the month and a similar, 19 percent surge in wheat prices. The cereal index is only 14 points below the all-time high of 274 points in April 2008.

The FAO registered a 12 percent rise in sugar prices in July, triggered by unseasonably wet weather in Brazil, the world’s largest exporter of cane sugar. Oils rose 2 percent, primarily on tighter supply outlooks and record prices for soybeans.

Price indexes for meats and dairy remained relatively unchanged for the month, although the protracted drought in the US rangeland has distressed many ranchers, who will be compelled to liquidate their herds. The US Department of Agriculture projects US consumer price inflation for meat, poultry, and dairy in the next few months as a result. Internationally, the higher cost of animal feed will ripple through livestock producers. This process may sharply affect Asia, where demand for meat is growing, but nations have smaller domestic stockpiles.

International food organization Oxfam warned in response to the FAO report that “millions of the world’s poorest will face devastation” from the increases. “This is not some gentle monthly wake-up call—it’s the same global alarm that’s been screaming at us since 2008,” Oxfam spokesman Colin Roche stated. “These figures prove that the world’s food system cannot cope on crumbling foundations. The combination of rising prices and expected low reserves means the world is facing a double danger.”

One billion people suffer from hunger worldwide. Hundreds of millions more who live in poverty are vulnerable to food inflation because they spend half or more of their incomes on staple goods. Food price shocks in 2008—driven by a confluence of weather disasters, protectionist measures, and speculators jumping ship from the financial market into commodities—produced food protests across more than 30 countries.

“There is a potential for a situation to develop like we had back in 2007-08,” FAO economist and grain analyst Abdolreza Abbassian told Reuters Thursday. “There is an expectation that this time around we will not pursue bad policies and intervene in the market by restrictions, and if that doesn’t happen we will not see such a serious situation as 2007/08. But if those policies get repeated, anything is possible.”

While economists and aid organizations have issued progressively dire warnings over the consequences of another food crisis, the underlying factors—extreme weather, a disjointed food distribution system, the possibility of export bans, and above all, rampant speculation—are more exacerbated than ever.

Indeed, commodities investors have rallied on the raft of bad news, making price shocks inevitable. Traders on the Chicago Board of Trade, banking on the USDA to issue a dire outlook on Friday, sent corn prices soaring Thursday morning to $8.265 per bushel, two cents below the all-time record set in July.

Major banks and hedge funds in particular have played a role in the rally. As Bloomberg News noted, “crops are the best-performing commodities this year, and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Macquarie Group Ltd. and Credit Suisse Group AG say the trend will continue.”

One Chicago trader commented to Reuters that Goldman Sachs was leading the betting on a USDA corn yield downgrade and predicting $9 corn and $20 soybeans by November. “The Goldman roll started Tuesday, you have that going on and the report is tomorrow. Everyone is expecting the corn number to be pretty friendly.”

Jaime Miralles of investment firm Intl FC Stone Europe said that “a firm $9 corn sentiment remains as rationing is and will be required.” Other speculators anticipate $10 per bushel corn prices in the coming months.

“I think general price firmness is being seen in ahead of the USDA report because the market is increasingly realising how horrible conditions are for U.S. corn,” Rabobank analyst Erin FitzPatrick commented. “There is pre-positioning ahead of the report as people are expecting more cuts in US harvest forecasts. Despite recent rain in the US, a lot of the damage has already been done to corn.”

Farmers and agricultural economists estimate that corn yield in much of the Corn Belt will be far lower than the USDA’s already downgraded estimate of 146 bushels per acre. Some areas may yield 100 bushels per acre or less, knocking the national corn crop back to levels not seen in decades.

The US Drought Monitor reported that for the week ending August 7, fully 80 percent of the contiguous US is experiencing drought. “Every day we go without significant rain is tightening the noose,” said meteorologist Mark Svoboda, who authored the latest Monitor report. In Iowa, the largest corn producing state, the area suffering from extreme drought more than doubled in size. As of August 7, nearly 70 percent of the state was under the most severe category of drought. Over 81 percent of Illinois and fully 94 percent of Missouri is in “at least extreme drought.”

The USDA estimates that inventories of corn, wheat, soybeans, and rice will be reduced to 2008 levels next year. Wheat inventories are projected to contract 7.5 percent.

Wheat production in Russia, the fourth largest exporter, is set to fall by 20 percent this year. The Australian wheat crop, stunted by repeated frosts and poor weather, may yield 40 percent less than initial projections. India’s agricultural region suffered a monsoon season providing 22 percent less rainfall than average, resulting in a 7.8 million ton loss in the global rice crop. The FAO also reduced rice production forecasts for Cambodia, Taiwan, North and South Korea, and Nepal.

Source: World Socialist Web Site

The ANCYL's memorandum to Helen Zille

Memorandum of demands from ANCYL Dullah Omar Region & others to the Premier of the Western Cape, Helen Zille, July 27 2012:

Memorandum of Demands

To: Western Cape Premier - Helen Zille

From : ANCYL, ANC, ANCWL, Cosatu, Taxi Association (CATA and Codeta) including other progressive formations.

The ANC Youth League (ANCYL) together with the above mentioned organizations have decided to embark on this revolutionary peoples march to the Provincial Parliament led by the Democratic Alliance (DA). This revolutionary march is inspired by the sad and gross conditions which our people continue to find themselves in on a daily basis.

Our people have never fought and died for another special type of apartheid to be born under a democratic government since 1994. Our parents, brothers and sisters gave up their lives in pursuit of a democratic, non- racial and non-sexist society. In 1994, our parents never voted to be led by a government that will re-introduce apartheid of a special type.

Since 2006 and 2009 when the DA took over the province,it has been concentrating on a programme to bring back apartheid in our lifetime. We have seen deliberate and concerted efforts and plans to divide and run amongst our people who are Africans, Coloured, Muslims and Indians. "We have seen statements like "take back what belongs to you", "Refugees" and so on. Whilst we wait patiently for our government to deliver to us constitutional rights in service, we see the DA undermining the National Government of the ANC through unfounded accusations of corruptions and incompetency.

We see the DA running around the entire country pointing failures of the ANC National Government whilst in the Western Cape there are huge failures and people live in dire situations. Today Cde and fellow Cape Tonians, We are here to unmask what is the real DA. Who is the DA fighting for? Who is Helen Zille?

The DA is a group of few white people who are bitter, angry and adamant in bringing back Apartheid at all cost. White South Africans refuse to live along side by side with Africans, Coloureds, Indians, Muslims and Khoi people. The DA keeps on painting a glossy picture about how we can live as a rainbow nation whilst the majority of our people live in the gutter and shacks. Today, we are saying ENOUGH IS ENOUGH. Ons is gatvol! Sanele!

We are gatvol because black people in the Western Cape continue to be tea girls and garden boys under the DA government which continues to perpetuate this by encouraging young people to work for labour brokers and other non-progressive and counter revolutionary businesses on a basis of getting experience which will make them employable in a capitalist state. We are saying to madam Zille, we do not want to make this province ungovernable and unworkable because we are quite capable of doing that and we are ready even now!!!

We demand the following from you and your collective government:

1. Land

We demand that land that is owned by private people and companies be made available for the building of decent houses and creation of better communities where black people and white live together. We demand the land in Rondebosch Square among many so that our people will live together as the constitution dictates so. This land must be made available for the poorest of the poor.

2. Service delivery

We demand that electricity is an essential service and it ought to be given to people without being made to suffer for it. We demand a speedy electrification of our poor and disadvantage areas. It is inhumane for people in 19 years of a democratic government to still live in darkness and only rely on candles and paraffin for energy.

We demand the DA administration to provide proper sanitation to our communities. 19 years into democracy our people still relieve themselves in Pota-loos. This violates our constitutional right, that of proper decent sanitation. It also perpetuates health hazards such as diarrhoea and ringworms. The bucket system is a mechanism to kill our people as the Premier referred to them "REFUGEES".

3. Human Settlement - 17 Billion - 1.7 spent?

We demand that the MEC to be dismissed including his department officials with immediate effect and be replaced by a more competent person who will not be remote controlled by Zille. The department is full of corruption till to date there is no one held accountable for this. Our people demand a speedy delivering of houses to people who have been on a waiting list for ever. We demand that all hostels in Mananberg, Elsie's River, Hanover Park etc built during the apartheid era to be demolished and that people get decent houses where they will live happily in their new democratic government.

We demand that people get houses closer to the CBD and not far from where they work. The view of locating our people as far as West Coast closer to the Malmesbury is ridiculous and absurd. We want houses in Rondebosch square and in Constantia. We know the department of human settlement in the City of Cape had a budget of R17billion and only R1.7 Billion was spent and none of our areas benefitted out of this. Zille must tell us where is the money?

We demand an end to TRA's because the government of Zille has clearly displayed that it does not understand what the meaning of temporary is. People in Mfuleni among other areas are dying in these fridges. A child died in Mfuleni Bosasa TRA's and nothing was done by government. How many more must die Zille???

We demand that all shacks within the City and Province to be eradicated by not later than 2014!!!

4. Safety and Security

We demand that Mr Dan Plato follow Mr Madikizela as he too proved to be a useless duck. Crime has escalated to its highest levels within the Western Cape and City of Cape Town under the rule of DA. Nyanga has not once but twice became the murder capital of the nation. Mananberg and Hanover Park children swim in drugs and guns yet the MEG and Zille smile, say that it is normal.

Why are police stations in the townships not given the necessary resources they need? Why are all security agencies deployed in Sea Point, Camps Bay and Constantia where there is little crime compared to our areas? The calling of SANDF proves that the government of Zille has failed our people. She is incompetent and a disaster. Madam Zille please do us a favour, JUST RESIGN!!!

5. Youth Wage Subsidy

We demand that this subsidy be discarded with immediate effect. This only just complements the labour broking system that is killing our people and youth in particular. We demand that decent employment and interventions to the levels of high employment be implemented. In the City of Cape Town alone, unemployment is at 33% - 40%. And worse there is no Youth policy that seeks to resolve this crisis.

The Youth of South Africa through a National Youth Parliament that was here in the Western Cape rejected this Policy. We are saying nothing about us without us. We demand a youth development policy and a program of job seekers grant to be researched and implemented.

6. Closure of 27 Schools

We demand that this attempt of closing six schools in our region must come to an end. Again, this proves that the DA government wants to reverse the gains made by our people in 1994.These schools have not only provided quality and meaningful contact time with learners, they are closer to their homes and do not have to travel long distances to reach school. We urge the provincial government to took into the matter and rather provide mechanisms to address the shortcomings faced by these schools. Do not close the schools!

7. Non delivery of Text books

The DA administration upholds the constitution of South Africa supreme. However it does not deliver to basic rights of our people, the right to education. The no delivery of textbooks to our schools is a disgrace and an indication that the DA administration undermines the rights of the people of South Africa, black in particular because the only schools that do not have textbooks are those found in black communities like Kraaifontein.

8. The IRT

The introduction of the IRT system in the transport industry has disabled the taxi industry. It has taken away jobs and businesses of taxi owners and drivers. 54 taxis had to stop operating due to this system that robbed families of their household income. We urge the provincial government to embark in a program that will revitalise the taxi industry and provide mechanical support to taxis that need service for the safety of passengers. The IRT costs taxpayers millions and we have seen in recent times that it is running at a loss!

Conclusion

We demand that the abovementioned demands be positively responded to within 7 working days. Failure to do so the young people and the abovementioned stakeholders will make this city and province ungovernable! Amandla!!!!

Issued by the ANCYL Dullah Omar Region on behalf of the People of the Western Cape.

July 27 2012

Source: Politics Web

World social inequality more pronounced than ever

The super-rich are currently hiding away wealth estimated between $21 trillion and $32 trillion in tax havens such as Switzerland and the Cayman Islands. This is the conclusion published last weekend by the Tax Justice Network, an NGO based in London. The author of the study is James Henry, a former chief economist at the McKinsey consulting firm and an expert on tax havens.

Henry bases his projections on data from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the United Nations and various national central banks. His study was limited to financial assets, and excluded tangible assets such as real estate, gold, jewellery or other possessions.

The figures reveal that “high net worth individuals” (defined as those with assets of over $50 million) have stashed away much larger sums in tax havens than previously thought. The report also shows that the concentration of global wealth in ever fewer hands has rapidly accelerated.

In 2005, the estimated offshore assets of the super-rich amounted to $11.5 trillion. Since then this total has doubled or tripled. Today the top 10 percent of the world’s population control 84 percent of assets, while the bottom 50 percent have access to just 1 percent. According to the study, the top of the pile—92,000 people who constitute an infinitesimal fraction of the world’s population—have hidden financial assets amounting to more than 9 trillion dollars, an average of nearly $100 million apiece.

The rapid growth of these assets during the past seven years shows that the global crisis of capitalism has been by no means disadvantageous for the financial elite. On the contrary, while more and more people in advanced countries are suffering due to government austerity programs and millions in developing countries are condemned to dire poverty, the super-rich have used the financial and economic turmoil of recent years to massively increase their wealth and hide their money beyond the reach of tax authorities.

They are assisted by a tax code that permits them to move huge amounts of money to offshore tax havens utilising legal loopholes and professional help.

While those on low incomes are strictly monitored by the state and are badgered for their tax payments, the super-rich are able to rely on a globally operating group of highly paid asset and investment advisers employed by the major international banks, which charge considerable sums in return for their tax fiddles. The four largest UK banks alone—HSBC, Barclays, Lloyds and Royal Bank of Scotland—have over 1,200 branches in tax havens.

According to Henry, the world’s 10 largest private financial institutions, including Deutsche Bank, moved more than $6.25 trillion offshore in 2010. Prior to the crash of 2007 the equivalent sum amounted to $2.34 trillion.

Those hit hardest by tax avoidance and tax evasion are developing countries. In the past 40 years the wealthiest citizens from 139 developing countries hid away non-declared assets estimated at $7.3 trillion to $9.3 trillion in tax havens. Their offshore assets are often greater than the national debt of their respective countries and play a major role in the lack of money to finance urgently needed public health and education programs in their home countries.

The top three in the list of countries with the most super-rich individuals are the US, China and Germany. A study by the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) recently revised upward its estimate of the fortune of the country’s top 1 percent, from 23 percent to 34 percent of national wealth, conceding that the incomes of ultra-wealthy households had not been included in its previous investigations.

Based on the findings of the enormous scale of hidden assets, Henry argues in his study that the previously applied standards for inequality, which are generally related to household income, have “dramatically underestimated” the real divide between rich and poor.

The author of the study agrees with the British economist and journalist Stewart Lansley, who writes in his recently published book, The Cost of Inequality: “There is absolutely no doubt at all that the statistics on income and wealth at the top understate the problem.”

Global social inequality today is not only much more pronounced than all the official statistics show. It has, in global terms, reached levels unprecedented in human history.

Source: World Socialist Web Site

Nasty, brutish and short

What can ordinary citizens do when the state – at either national, provincial or local government level – fails to fulfil its most basic obligations towards citizens to create the conditions that make it possible for them to live meaningful lives and to flourish? In developing his concept that a modern state is based on social contract between the governed and those who govern, Thomas Hobbes famously wrote that life in a state of nature is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”.

In such a state of nature, Hobbes argued, people fear death, and lack access to both the basic conditions that make a meaningful life possible, and the hope of being able to work to obtain a better life for themselves. In order to avoid this perilous state of affairs, people accede to a social contract and establish a civil society. According to Hobbes, society is a population beneath a sovereign authority (the state), to whom all individuals in that society cede some rights for the sake of protection. Any abuses of power by this authority are to be accepted as the price of peace.

In today’s human rights dominated world, the idea that we should accept abuses of power by those in authority merely because they create the basic conditions within which a meaningful life becomes possible, has been entirely discredited. But the fiction that we enter into a social contract with those in authority by ceding some of our freedom to them in exchange for the provision of basic services, still holds sway. When the state then reneges on its part of the bargain and fails to provide even the most basic minimum services to citizens, the mythical social contract breaks down completely.

This seems to have happened in the Gert Sibande municipality in Mpumalanga, where the 17000 citizens of Carolina seem not to have had access to sufficiently clean water since January (although this is being disputed by the officials and politicians) when the dam that supplies water to Carolina was polluted with acid mine water.

In response to this complete failure by the municipality to secure the provision of clean water, some residents of Carolina – with the assistance of Lawyers for Human Rights (LHR) and the Legal Resources Centre (LRC) – approached the North Gauteng High Court. Yesterday judge Moses Mavundla gave the acting executive mayor of the Gert Sibande municipality, Tunu Agnes Mnisi, and municipal manager DV Ngcobo, 72 hours to provide the 17000 citizens of Carolina, in Mpumalanga, with potable water.

The municipality had placed water tanks around town after disaster struck, but according to residents from early March 2012, until beginning of May 2012, the system of providing potable water through the tanks proved inadequate. Sometimes some of the tanks were not refilled, some remained empty. The tanks were accessed on “first come first served” basis. The end result was that the water supply in general was inadequate. Some of the residents have to walk long distances to access the potable water from the tanks.

Section 27 of the Constitution states that “[e]veryone has the right to have access to … sufficient food and water” and places a positive duty on the state to take reasonable legislative and other measures, within its available resources, to achieve the progressive realisation” of this right. The right to water is further amplified in the Water Services Act which states that every water services authority has a duty to all consumers or potential consumers in its area of jurisdiction to progressively ensure efficient, affordable, economical and sustainable access to water services. The Act also states that this duty is subject to, inter alia, the availability of resources and the need to regulate access to water services in an equitable way.

Where access to clean water is not provided because of a failure on the part of the municipality to take reasonable steps to ensure continued access to clean water, the right of access to water as protected in section 27 of the Act, read with the provisions of the Water Services Act, is being denied to citizens.

Of course, the crisis was originally caused by mines who failed to take steps to prevent the pollution of the dam with acid mine water. In terms of legislation they can be held financially liable for the damage they caused. But the mines are not constitutionally and legally obliged to provide the residents of Carolina with clean drinking water. That duty falls squarely on the municipality.

It was therefore disappointing to read comments by Water and Environmental Affairs Minister Edna Molewa that the court action brought by the residents provides evidence of a war against the state. “The mines were not cited in the court action.… You know, there is a war against the state,” said Ms Molewa at a Pretoria media briefing on Judge Mavundla’s ruling. The judge made no order against the Department of Water Affairs.

No Minister, there is no war against the state. Where the state fails to provide even the most basic services to citizens due to incompetence, laziness, arrogance, corruption or nepotism and in complete disregard of the basic needs of citizens, those citizens have a right and a duty to approach a court to try and get the relevant municipality to do what it is legally required to do. When the citizens do this and when the court then orders the municipality to do what it is legally required to do, it is not at war with the state but is in fact correcting the most basic breach of the social contract between the state and its citizens, saving the state from complete collapse.

Besides, as LRC attorney Naseema Fakir explained, although the LRC and the LHR had considered adding the mines to the action, it was felt that it was important to get water to Carolina’s residents as soon as possible. If the mines had been added as respondents, the application for an urgent court order would not have been granted. This is because the mines are not the ones who are constitutionally and legally obliged to provide citizens with clean water.

The Minister’s attitude is strange and troubling indeed. Instead of apologising to the citizens of Carolina for the criminal negligence of the municipality, she acts as if it is treasonous for citizens to have their most basic rights enforced through the courts. Her comments suggest that she believes that it is not legitimate for the state to be held accountable and to be ordered to take the most basic steps to provide citizens with clean water, without which life itself is not possible.

What is the use of us paying the salaries of the mayor of Gert Sibande municipality (and of the Minister for that matter), when they are not doing their jobs and not protecting us from the chaos of a nasty, brutish and short life? Maybe we should stop paying the Minister’s salary and those of her bodyguards for six months so that she can see how it feels to be treated like dirt.

No Minister, the war, if there is one, is being waged against citizens by tardy and incompetent government officials. As citizens in a constitutional democracy we have a right to approach the court in order to force the government to do its job and if we do we are not waging war against our government – just trying to get it to do what we pay it to do.

Source: Constitutionally Speaking

A.N.C., Admitting Failures, Weighs How to Lift South Africans

During apartheid, in the coastal municipality of Overstrand, just east of Cape Town, whites lived in plush, seaside enclaves whereas blacks and mixed race people lived in ugly townships and shacks. Whites owned almost all the businesses, and had access to the best jobs, health care and schools.

Eighteen years after the end of apartheid, not much has changed, said Maurencia Gillion, a local politician who grew up and still lives in Overstrand.

“The rich white people live in their beautiful holiday homes,” Ms. Gillion said. “The rest are in slums, in squatter areas. Even after 18 years, in reality apartheid remains.”

That would seem a harsh critique of the party that has governed South Africa since the end of minority rule in 1994, the century-old African National Congress. It came not from an opposition leader, but one of the party’s own. Ms. Gillion is a senior A.N.C. leader in her province, and her words were simply an echo of what the party’s leader, President Jacob Zuma, said in a speech minutes earlier.

“The structure of the apartheid economy has remained largely intact,” Mr. Zuma said, in a speech to thousands of delegates to the A.N.C.’s policy conference, held every five years, before the presidential election, to work out the party’s platform. “The ownership of the economy is still primarily in the hands of white males, as it has always been.”

The four-day conference here, which began Tuesday, has been devoted to considerable soul-searching about what the A.N.C. has, and has not, achieved in 18 years in power. With unemployment at 25 percent, and much higher for young blacks, and corruption widespread, there is a growing perception that the A.N.C. has become the party of a small black elite interested only in its own enrichment. To counter this perception, the party has released a set of back-to-basics policy proposals that it claims will help deliver on its old election slogan: “A better life for all.”

The party’s own analysis had this to say about South Africa’s predicament nearly two decades after the end of apartheid: “Too few people work; the standard of education of most black learners is of poor quality; infrastructure is poorly located, under-maintained and insufficient to foster higher growth; spatial patterns exclude the poor from the fruits of development; the economy is overly and unsustainably resource-intensive; a widespread disease burden is compounded by a failing health system; public services are uneven and often of poor quality; corruption is widespread; and South Africa remains a divided society.”

Officials were quick to say that 18 years is a short time to reverse centuries of discrimination under colonial and apartheid rule that left black South Africans ill equipped to compete in a liberalized economy. And Mr. Zuma ticked off a list of major achievements: millions of new houses for the poor; millions more connected to the electric grid and piped water systems; and a growing and vibrant black middle class.

Embedded in the policy documents and Mr. Zuma’s remarks is an argument that the process of transforming the country’s economy to put more wealth in the hands of blacks was hampered by the need to make peace with the former white rulers.

“We had to make certain compromises in the national interest,” Mr. Zuma said. “We had to be cautious about restructuring the economy in order to maintain economic stability and confidence at the time. Thus the economic power relations of the apartheid era have remained intact.”

The party is thus proposing what it calls a “second transition,” this one focused on economic, rather than political, change.

The policy proposals take a hard look at some of the most difficult issues facing South Africa, and at the A.N.C.’s internal struggles. One asks whether the government should dispense with the current policy of land redistribution and replace it with a more aggressive one. Another contemplates nationalizing the country’s mines.

Taken together, the proposals would, if adopted, represent a sharp leftward shift for the A.N.C., which despite its roots has largely backed a free-market economy with minimal state intervention. The proposals are being discussed this week and will be decided upon when the party holds its convention in December.

Some A.N.C. members have been pushing for a more radical program of redistribution of wealth from whites to blacks. The party’s Youth League, under the firebrand leader Julius Malema, had demanded that gold, platinum and diamond mines be nationalized. Cosatu, an alliance of trade unions that is one of the A.N.C.’s main allies, has pushed for banks to be nationalized.

Yet, according to the A.N.C.’s own analysis, its failure to deliver economic progress may be its own fault. The party has experienced “a silent shift from transformative politics to palace politics wherein internal strife and factional battles over power and resources define the political life of the movement,” a far cry from its founding as a liberation movement built on socialist principles.

For all the fears of a leftward shift that could lead to the repossession of white-owned land, as happened in Zimbabwe, or the nationalization of mines, such moves are highly unlikely, said Steven Friedman, a political analyst at the Center for the Study of Democracy at the University of Johannesburg.

“There is going to be lots of fairly radical rhetoric, and the actual proposals are going to be actually quite meek and mild,” Mr. Friedman said. “This has been the pattern all along.”

Indeed, some delegates at the conference advocated a go-slow approach.

“I support the sharing of wealth, but I don’t think we should go for a radical approach,” said Tim Mkhari, a delegate from Limpopo, a province on the country’s northern edge.

“We should not take the Zimbabwe route,” he said.

Source: New York Times

The communists have got this right

Here’s something important to read and understand. From a South African Communist Party Central Committee statement  released today – I just caught it on Politicsweb here.

You can disagree with the communists about a range of points of strategy and of principle, but they accurately and urgently identify populism as exemplified by the ANC Youth League ruling faction (and be clear, this is what they are talking about) as the greatest threat to the ruling alliance and, more importantly, to the South African democracy.

This is their call to arms:

We are dealing with an anti-worker, anti-left, anti-communist, pseudo-militant demagogy that betrays all of our long-held ANC-alliance traditions of internal organizational democracy, mutual respect for comrades, non-racialism, and service to our people. It has created substantial space for an anti-majoritarian, conservative reactive groundswell that seeks to tarnish the whole movement, portraying us all as anti-constitutionalist and as narrow nationalist chauvinists.

It was only a matter of time before a rescue attempt of the sliding democratic project was launched from within the alliance. It was always going to come either from Cosatu or the SACP – and despite its lack of a mass base, the SACP is more venerable and respected within the ANC

The communist leadership has dissipate into government and its voice has been softer and more defensive as a result. It remains to be seen if the party is still able to crack the whip loud enough to drive our domestic version of Zanu-PF back into its cage.

Source: Nic Borain

Right-wing demagogy the greatest threat - SACP

Central Committee warns against dangerous tendency within ANC alliance

SACP Central Committee Statement

The Central Committee of the SACP met in Johannesburg over the weekend of the 10-12th June. An analysis of the May 18th local government elections, an interaction on challenges within the youth sector (in which we were joined by the national executive committee of the Young Communist League), further consolidation of the SACP's perspectives on government's New Growth Path framework document, and preparations for the commemoration of the SACP's 90th anniversary were among the main items under discussion.

The CC suspended deliberations for most of Saturday to enable CC members to join thousands of other South Africans at the funeral of our beloved leader, cde Albertina Sisulu. Cde Albertina was the second recipient (after cde Madiba) of the SACP's Chris Hani Peace Award. Hamba kahle, Mama Sisulu! May we never forget your inspiring example of courageous, militant and unassuming service to the people of South Africa - you passed on with your dignity and integrity intact.

May 18th Local Government elections

The SACP was an active partner in the ANC's local government election campaign from the outset with the development of the election manifesto, through the candidate selection process, and into mass mobilization and door-to-door work. The CC saluted the role played by our tens of thousands of activists in the campaign.

The CC also congratulated the many communist militants who, in their capacity as ANC members and leaders, have been elected as councilors. In particular, the CC congratulated CC member, cde Zukiswa Ncitha who has been elected mayor of the new Buffalo City Metro, and KZN SACP chairperson, cde James Nxumalo, elected as mayor of the eThekwini metro.

These positive developments which bring added responsibilities to the Party and its members are in line with our medium term vision of seeking to build progressive influence and working class hegemony in all sites of struggle. The SACP calls on all ANC councilors not to take the electorate for granted and to ensure that with our support we rise to the expectations expressed in the campaign.

The CC agreed that with 63% of the vote the ANC together with its alliance partners had, once more, received an overwhelming electoral mandate. The CC further noted that this significant electoral victory was achieved in challenging circumstances - in the midst of the local aftershocks of the global economic crisis, and in the context of many challenges in the local government sphere. In many other countries, from the US to Spain, previously incumbent political parties have suffered massive electoral defeats in the midst of the economic crisis. The ANC-alliance's sustained performance and continued overwhelming majority support from our core constituencies is, therefore, particularly noteworthy.

However, the ANC-alliance would also be seriously mistaken if we did not take note of many warning lights from this election campaign. There was, for a local election, an exceptional voter turnout.

Some of this was attributable to the DA's ability to turn out a very high level of support in so-called "minority", and particularly white areas. But the high turnout was also a popular response from our mass base in provinces and municipalities where the working class and poor sensed that their organizations and their struggle were under threat from an axis of anti-majoritarian forces that included the major media houses, right-wing NGOs like Afriforum, and the DA.

But in other provinces and municipalities there was a noticeable decline in ANC voter turnout, which is in part an indication of frustration with corruption and ineffective ANC performance in some municipalities.

The SACP welcomed the innovative ANC candidate selection process that involved active community participation. Amongst other things, this approach to candidate selection sought to bring popular power to bear in the struggle against organizational gate-keeping, tenderpreneurship, and money-politics. In some cases, regional gate-keepers and money politics still managed to either side-step or hijack the community participation process provoking some of the current popular anger - but, overwhelmingly, community participation proved to be a very positive process. The SACP will be strongly supporting this approach for future elections, while learning lessons and adapting where needed.

The CC noted the many subjective and objective problems in the local government sphere. Much criticism of local government focuses, often correctly, on subjective weaknesses - inappropriate deployments, corruption, tenderpreneurship, etc. However, we need also to look at the objective challenges in the current model of local government and the impossible challenges with which many local governments are confronted. The SACP supports the overall thrust of the Municipal Systems Amendment Bill that has passed through both houses in parliament and now awaits presidential proclamation.

We also support turnaround proposals from the Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs department . Amongst other things, we support the measure that office bearers (not members) of political parties should not occupy senior administrative posts in local government; and the need for a more clearly defined separation between the roles of elected councilors and administrators. The SACP strongly supports the critical need to strengthen popular participatory involvement in local government through, amongst other things, ward committees. These measures are not just legalistic and institutional responses to challenges.

They are aimed at professionalizing and greatly improving the efficiency and effectiveness of local government. They will also help to strike at the heart of areas in which corruption and tenderpreneurship have often proliferated. Other critical areas that require attention include the funding model for local government, and the key role of district municipalities in rural development.

Right-wing demagogy within the ranks of the broader movement - the greatest threat to the national democratic revolution

There are many lessons that need to be derived from the May 18th election campaign - but the greatest of all is that factionalism led by a dangerous right-wing demagogy within our broader movement is costing us dearly. This demagogy constitutes the greatest threat, not just to our electoral performance, but also to our hard-won democratic achievements as a country in general.

We are dealing with an anti-worker, anti-left, anti-communist, pseudo-militant demagogy that betrays all of our long-held ANC-alliance traditions of internal organizational democracy, mutual respect for comrades, non-racialism, and service to our people. It has created substantial space for an anti-majoritarian, conservative reactive groundswell that seeks to tarnish the whole movement, portraying us all as anti-constitutionalist and as narrow nationalist chauvinists.

The SACP calls on our Alliance partners to unite, to close ranks and to deal decisively with this grave threat. Closing ranks does not mean that various other debates and differences amongst us should be suppressed - but it does mean that within and across our Alliance we must not open up a dozen fronts of fractious public dispute, as if all differences and debates were of equal significance.

So how do we unite to confront the demagogic challenge? There is one fundamental response - across the Alliance we need to take up with renewed vigour the programme of action that we have agreed upon at the ANC's 2007 Polokwane conference and in subsequent Alliance summits. The programme of action embraces five key pillars - jobs, education and training, health, rural development and the fight against crime and corruption. It is a programme of action that must combine the determined exercise of state power and active mobilization of popular forces.

In the midst of media-supported diversions we often lose sight of very important gains made in these key areas of transformation. Popular mobilization and a change in government policy have seen, for instance, a very significant reduction of mother-to-child HIV/Aids transmission - saving an estimated 67,000 children. There have been important gains in funding students through a reinvigorated mandate for NSFAS. National Treasury has announced very important corruption-busting measures that name and shame fronting and other tenderpreneuring activities and prevent those involved in doing business with government. All of these measures have been won as a result of popular struggles and a more determined and strategic use of state power.

But these advances must be replicated across the board, and particularly in areas of burning concern - notably the crisis of unemployment (especially youth unemployment) and rural development - including the critical questions of accelerated land reform and sustainable rural livelihoods. The CC supports the Department of Land Affairs and Rural Development's intention to bring to cabinet the proposal of reopening the land restitution program. The SACP has resolved to pursue our cooperatives campaign linking this much more actively to prescribed state procurement policies. The SACP will also be closely studying the important Indian rural work-guarantee programme, we believe it has important potential application to SA when addressing rural development and youth unemployment.

The crisis in Swaziland

The deepening economic and social crisis in Swaziland in the midst of a ruling elite's squandering of resources, underlines the importance of increased pressure to ensure that this backward feudal dispensation is finally democratized. The CC noted and welcomed the recent launch of a Swaziland Communist Party which is already making an important impact in strengthening the broader democratic movement.

Forward to the 90th anniversary of the SACP!

The end of July marks the 90th anniversary of the Communist Party in South Africa. In the course of nine decades, the Communist Party has made an indelible contribution to the South African struggle and to our new democratic dispensation. The Communist Party was the first, and for many decades the only, political party in SA that not only aspired to a non-racial future, but had an active membership of black and white comrades shoulder-to-shoulder in struggle. The Communist Party pioneered militant trade unionism, and progressive journalism in SA. As many generations of outstanding ANC leaders, among them cde Nelson Mandela, have acknowledged, the Party has also made an outstanding contribution to consolidating and defending a mass-based and campaigning ANC.

The 90th anniversary celebrations will be launched on the 3rd July in Bushbuckridge, in Mpumalanga, with many Red Forums and other activities in all provinces, culminating in a main rally on 31 July at Sugar Ray Xulu Stadium, Clermont in KZN.

Statement issued by the SACP, June 12 2011

Source: Politicsweb

Seventy years since the assassination of Leon Trotsky

This report was delivered by WSWS International Editorial Board Chairman and Socialist Equality Party (US) National Chairman David North to a meeting in Berlin on October 17.

Seventy years, more than two-thirds of a century, have passed since the assassination of Leon Trotsky. In political terms, this is a substantial period of time. It is a platitude to state the obvious: that so much has changed since 1940. The world of Churchill, Roosevelt and Hitler seems—the verb has been chosen with deliberation—to belong to a long-past era. Whether it is really so far behind us is a question that demands very serious consideration, especially when one examines the reception of Leon Trotsky by historians. Whatever else has changed in the world, Trotsky remains an extraordinarily contemporary figure. Even after the passage of 70 years, the passions evoked by his name have not subsided.

Two days after Trotsky’s assassination, the New York Times, in an editorial that welcomed his death, wrote spitefully: “The victims of his cold cruelty … can be numbered in the millions. … It was not enough for him that Russia should be drenched in blood and suffering; the whole world had to wade through a sea of violence so that the triumph of the proletariat could be assured.”

The vitriol of the editorialists who penned those lines can be understood. They feared Trotsky as the greatest revolutionary of their time. He represented a threat to their interests and way of life. They were writing about an enemy whose deeds had shaped the world in which they lived. However, the editorialists could not help but acknowledge the immense scale of their adversary’s achievements:

“He was a powerful writer, an orator who could sway vast crowds, an organizer of sheer genius … It was Trotsky, newly arrived in Russia from New York’s East Side, who took a nondescript, ragged mass of Russians and welded them into the Red Army. He drove every ‘white’ general from the soil of Russia, he broke every Allied attempt to restore the old regime, he gave a semblance of order to a transport and supply system that had been sunk in utter chaos.”

Seventy years after Trotsky’s death, the anger of his enemies has not subsided. In the course of the last seven years, three biographies of Trotsky, by British historians, have been published. The first, by Ian Thatcher, appeared in 2003. The second, by Geoffrey Swain, was brought out in 2005. The most recent, by Robert Service, was published, amidst great fanfare, last year. There is not a trace of historical detachment, objectivity, let alone basic honesty, in these biographies. The authors write about Trotsky as if he were a living political opponent and their personal enemy. Oddly enough, the editorialists of the Times, writing in 1940, for all their politically-embittered anger, were more scrupulous in their attitude toward the facts. They, at least, acknowledged the vast historical role played by Trotsky.

I have spent no small amount of time answering and refuting the books of Thatcher, Swain and Service, which are all shameless exercises in historical distortion and falsification. My essays and lectures on these three authors have been collected and brought together in a book that runs to approximately 200 pages. I am indebted to the Mehring Verlag for having produced a German-language edition of this book. I would like to be able to say that my critique was exhaustive in its refutation of Swain, Thatcher and Service. Unfortunately, I was compelled, under the pressure of time and other responsibilities, to concentrate my attention on only the most egregious of these writers’ falsifications of the historical record.

I had hoped, with the publication of In Defense of Leon Trotsky, that it might be possible to take a welcome respite from the less than pleasant task of answering so-called historians who make a career of falsifying and distorting. Alas, that wish is not likely to be fulfilled. Before my coming to Germany, the comrades of the Partei für Soziale Gleichheit (PSG—Socialist Equality Party) informed me of the decidedly hostile attitude of the faculty of the Department of History at the Humboldt University to the scheduled public lecture of Professor Alexander Rabinowitch on the October Revolution. The department was unwilling to make available a suitable lecture hall, or even formally welcome Rabinowitch’s presence at the Humboldt—if only by inviting him for a cup of coffee.

I was interested to discover the source of the history faculty’s hostility to Professor Rabinowitch’s lecture. Certainly, something more than bad manners was involved. And, as a review of the writings of members of this faculty quickly established, that is most definitely the case.

The online archive of the history faculty at the Humboldt includes a review of Robert Service’s Trotsky by university lecturer Andreas Oberender. He is a junior member of the faculty working under the direction of Professor Jörg Baberowski. Oberender’s work demonstrates, if nothing else, that the contemporary campaign to discredit Trotsky is not a uniquely Anglo-American exercise.

Oberender’s enthusiasm for Service’s biography knows no bounds. He joyfully welcomes Service’s long-overdue demolition of the “myth” of Trotsky’s world-historical significance. As if following a script written by Service himself, Oberender repeats the latter’s dismissal of the renowned Trotsky biographies of Isaac Deutscher and Pierre Broué. These writers were mere “apologists” and “worshippers” of Trotsky.

In contrast, Oberender praises Service as the “ideal biographer” of Trotsky: “Completely above suspicion of any connection to Trotskyism, he possesses the required critical distance to his protagonist…” Oberender fails to consider that Service’s association with the virulently anti-communist Hoover Institute at Stanford University calls into question his claim of “critical distance” and objectivity.

Despite his unqualified praise for Service’s biography, Oberender has nothing concrete to say about it. He does not cite even a single sentence from this supposedly brilliant work. Instead, he devotes almost all of his review to his own vicious denunciation of Trotsky.

Oberender writes, “Without his already early apparent writing and speaking talents he would have merely remained a young revolutionary among many. He had no other means of drawing attention to himself apart from his rhetoric."

How is one to answer such a banal and absurd statement? What would one think of a biographer of Count Leo Tolstoy who wrote, “Without his talent as a writer, Tolstoy would have simply remained a wealthy landowner among many others. Had he not written War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Resurrection, and The Death of Ivan Ilyitch, no one would care about Tolstoy. Except for his skill as a writer, he had no means to call attention to himself.” Yes, how profoundly true!

Underlying Oberender’s diatribe against Trotsky is a bitter hatred of the socialist movement. He continues:

“Trotsky's development hardly differed from that of the typical left-wing member of the radical intelligentsia alienated by the Tsarist regime. The milieu of his socialization was the unhealthy hotbed of fractional in-fighting predominating in the circle of émigrés and editorial boards with their endless scholastic debates over the purity of the Marxist doctrine and the correct path to revolution.” Trotsky, according to Oberender, “never emerged from the suffocating influence of Russian social democracy; the reader looks in vain for any signs of candor and willingness to reach out to other intellectuals and ideological milieus.”

What astonishing ignorance! Trotsky’s activities and influence, before 1917, was not confined to the milieu of the Russian social democracy. He was a major figure in the European socialist movement, well known to all the major leaders of the Second International—including Ramsey MacDonald, the British Fabian and future prime minister. Trotsky spoke and wrote fluently in French and German. He was, at least before 1914, on close personal terms with Karl Kautsky and his articles appeared in Die Neue Zeit. Trotsky was considered an outstanding authority on the politics of the Balkans. As for the range of his cultural interests, not even Service denies that Trotsky wrote on a wide range of intellectual, literary and artistic trends. Trotsky wrote on subjects such as Nietzsche, Ibsen, and the European artistic avant-garde.

Oberender continues: “The adoption and reception of Marxism by the young Trotsky graphically demonstrates what happens when an undoubtedly agile and responsive intellect submits to an ideology, which walls itself within a hermetically sealed conceptual structure and recognizes reality only through the prism of rigid dogma and irrefutable truths.”

Oberender, in a manner typical of vulgar pragmatists, attempts to deride as “dogmatic” those like Trotsky who are conscious of theoretical method and who think systematically. He fails to identify the “rigid dogmas” and “irrefutable truths” that supposedly marred Trotsky’s thinking. Presumably, Oberender has in mind the entire opus of Marxist thought, its foundations in philosophical materialism, and the materialist conception of history. It does not occur to Oberender that his own assertions, laid down without supporting arguments, exemplify the sort of dogmatic thinking of which he accuses Trotsky.

Oberender goes on: “Impartial analysis and objective argumentation were not Trotsky's cup of tea; he was a master of grandiose phrases and abrasive polemics, gifted with the dubious talent of masking the most abstruse and outlandish ideas in dazzling rhetorical pomp. His stylistic excesses went hand in hand with a striking lack of substance and profundity.”

Oberender assumes that his readers are totally ignorant of Trotsky’s literary opus and the immense influence that he exerted through his writings on public opinion. Brecht said in 1931, in conversation with Walter Benjamin and Hermann Hesse, that Trotsky could be justly considered the greatest writer in Europe. And Brecht, it should be noted, was not a political supporter of Trotsky. Any professional academic capable of writing such dishonest and unadulterated rubbish forfeits all right to be taken seriously as a historian.

Trotsky’s writings on European and world politics over a period of nearly 40 years are unequaled in their perspicacity. Nevertheless Oberender continues:

“Trotsky wrote vast numbers of texts in quick succession, assuming the competence to address all manner of issues, with the result that his unrestrained urge to communicate descended into empty verbiage. Significantly, in June 1926 the Politburo called upon Trotsky to rein in his mass production of texts and concentrate more on the posts and tasks given to him by the party.”

Oberender’s sympathies are with Stalin and the rest of Trotsky’s factional opponents in the Soviet Politburo. He fails to note that the Stalinist efforts to censure Trotsky were part of an expanding campaign to silence and legally proscribe the greatest and most popular opponent of the growing bureaucracy.

Oberender descends ever lower. In a ludicrous exercise in counter-factual history, he asks: “What would have become of Trotsky if the Tsarist regime had not collapsed as a result of the First World War? He would have then had to make his way through life as a left radical journalist and aging revolutionary in waiting.”

And what, we might similarly ask, would have happened to Lincoln without the crisis of the union? He would have remained a small town lawyer. Or what would have happened to Luther without the conflict between Rome and the German princes that set the stage for the Reformation? On a somewhat more modest scale, what, one might wonder, would have happened to Frau Merkel without the fall of the Berlin Wall? Oberender asks us to consider, in essence, what would have become of Trotsky if the 20th century hadn’t happened! But, without Herr Oberender’s permission, it did happen, and he is not pleased with the results.

“In times of revolution and civil war he quit his desk in order to agitate among the masses and the Red Army to take up arms against the Whites. His rhetorical and organizational talents, together with his undoubtedly unsentimental approach to the use of violence, allowed him to quickly become one of the best known and most influential party leaders.”

In other words, in the maelstrom of war and revolution, in which millions of people became engaged in massive political struggles, Trotsky emerged as one of the great figures of world history!

Oberender now wants to undo what occurred in history. “What remains from Trotsky and his mystique?... Having read the [Service] biography there can be no doubt that on the basis of a critical examination not much remains of Trotsky's once overblown reputation. His writings belong mostly in a cabinet of curiosities, and the extravagance of his thought strikes one today, in our own non-ideological age, as strange, if not bizarre. The Fourth International he founded is barely a footnote in the history of the workers' movement.”

Mr. Oberender, I understand, was born in what was once East Germany. How would he assess today the place of the Stalinist ruling SED in the history of the workers’ movement? Or, for that matter, that of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union? What remains of these reactionary bureaucratic structures? Trotsky foretold the fate of the Stalinist parties: “Of these reactionary organizations,” he wrote, “not one stone will be left on another.”

As Mr. Oberender indulged in speculation as to what would have been Trotsky’s fate had not War and Revolution intervened, he cannot object when I pose the question: What would have happened to Mr. Oberender had the German Democratic Republic not collapsed? Frankly, I doubt that his life would have proceeded all that differently. A place would have been found for his meager talents somewhere within the academic structures of the GDR. He might have even found a place within the Humboldt University. Indeed, the review he has written of the Service biography could have been published in a Stalinist journal without a single word being changed!

Oberender claims that Trotsky’s writings belong in a cabinet of curiosities, which have no relevance to our times. A strange verdict, coming from a historian—especially one whose specialty, supposedly, is the history of the Soviet Union. To say that Trotsky is irrelevant is tantamount to dismissing the historical significance of what must be counted among the most important events of the 20th century—the Russian Revolution. Is it possible to understand the political strategy that guided the October Revolution without reference to the writings of Leon Trotsky? No serious historian could exclude from his study of 1917 a careful reading of Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, which also happens to be one of the indisputable masterpieces of world literature. Similarly, a study of Trotsky’s Revolution Betrayed remains the essential work not only for historians, but for anyone today who wishes to understand what the Soviet Union was and the origin and nature of the social, economic and political contradictions that led to its dissolution in 1991—a fate foreseen by Trotsky in 1936!

To a degree unequalled by any other writer of his lifetime, Trotsky’s literary work remains extraordinarily contemporary. For all the many changes in the world over the last 70 years, Trotsky dealt with issues, processes and problems that remain with us to this day: the nature of world economy and its relationship to the nation-state; the significance and implications of the global hegemony of American imperialism; and the fragility of bourgeois democracy. Of course, Mr. Oberender does not even provide the title of a single work by Trotsky. But of all his omissions, the most troubling is his failure to even note what must be considered, at least by a German historian, among Trotsky’s greatest achievements: his analysis of German fascism and his impassioned warning of the colossal menace that Nazism posed to the German and international working class.

Does Mr. Oberender believe that these writings, too, belong in a cabinet of historical curiosities? Have these no relevance to our supposedly “non-ideological” age? Even as we meet, a major exhibit on the Nazi regime has been mounted in Berlin’s Museum of History. To this day, German politics and culture is scarred by the Nazi victory in January 1933 and its aftermath. But this victory was achieved by the fascists only as a consequence of the cowardly and irresponsible policies of the Social Democratic and Communist parties, which refused to unite the millions of socialist workers in Germany for a common struggle against Hitler.

Trotsky’s warnings on the danger posed by fascism rank among the most prescient political documents written in the 20th century. They are all the more extraordinary for having been written by Trotsky while he lived in enforced exile in Turkey. Trotsky called for a united front of the working class against the Nazis, and denounced both the SPD’s pathetic subordination to Hindenburg and the Stalinist party’s criminally irresponsible identification of the Social Democracy with fascism. While the Stalinist KPD claimed, with a mixture of demagogy and terrified fatalism, that a Nazi victory would lead quickly to a communist revolution, Trotsky warned that Hitler’s assumption of power would represent a political catastrophe of unimaginable dimensions.

All claims that it would have made no difference if Trotsky had emerged victorious from the inner-party struggle are refuted by the events in Germany. If no other issue had divided Trotsky and Stalin, the collision over Germany was of sufficient historical moment to justify the claim that Trotsky’s defeat had the most tragic consequences.

Permit me to refer to one document written by Trotsky in April 1932, nine months before Hitler’s victory. What would be the appropriate response of the Soviet government to a fascist victory? Trotsky wrote:

“…My relations with the present Moscow government are not such that I have any right to speak in its name or refer to its intentions, about which I, like every other reader and man of politics, can judge only on the basis of all the information accessible. But I am all the more free to say how in my opinion the Soviet government ought to act in case of a fascist state victory in Germany. Upon receiving the telegraphic communication of this event, I would sign an order for the mobilization of the reserves. When you have a mortal enemy before you, and when war flows from the logic of the objective situation, it would be unpardonable light-mindedness to give the enemy time to establish and fortify himself … and thus grow up to the dimensions of a colossal danger.”

Does Mr. Oberender believe that these words, too, belong in a cabinet of historical curiosities?

What assessment is to be made of Leon Trotsky, 70 years after his death? We now have the advantage of historical perspective. We know the outcome of the political conflicts in which Trotsky played so central a role. We know the fate of the Soviet Union, and of the Stalinist regime that came to power on the basis of the political struggle against Trotsky.

The question must be asked: Which perspective was confirmed by subsequent historical development: the Stalin-Bukharin theory of “socialism in one country” or Trotsky’s refutation of the possibility of establishing socialism on a national basis? Which perspective anticipated the trajectory of economic development: Stalin’s autarkic conception of national socialism or Trotsky’s insistence on the primacy of global economic processes?

The history of the Soviet Union, taken as a whole, establishes that the campaign against Trotsky and Trotskyism, which began in the Politburo in 1923, marked the onset of a right-wing and essentially Russian nationalist reaction against the revolutionary internationalist program on which the October Revolution had been based. Within little more than a decade, the expulsion of the internationalists within the Soviet Communist Party developed into an unrestrained campaign of political genocide aimed at the physical extermination of all the representatives of Marxist politics and culture within the socialist intelligentsia and working class.

The Soviet Union emerged from the anti-socialist terror of the 1930s a politically-scarred society. Stalin’s campaign of mass murder, which included the destruction of virtually the entire officer corps of the Soviet Union, abetted the Nazis and facilitated their subsequent invasion. The horrifying human losses suffered by the USSR between 1941 and 1945 were attributable, to a great extent, to the impact of the Stalinist purges. The Soviet victory in World War II could not, in the long run, reverse the disastrous political trajectory of the USSR. All the frantic reform efforts of the Soviet bureaucracy, after Stalin’s death in 1953, developed on the basis of the nationalist program that formed the basis of the Stalinist regime. The system left behind by Stalin staggered from crisis to crisis until its collapse less than 38 years after the dictator’s death. And the form of that collapse—the dissolution of the USSR by the bureaucracy, the conversion of nationalized property into private property, and the transformation of sections of the bureaucracy into capitalist multibillionaires—proceeded along the lines anticipated by Trotsky in the 1930s.

In conclusion, I would like to address the relevance of Trotsky today. What is Trotsky’s place in history? As a writer, orator, strategist of revolutionary insurrection, military leader and political thinker, Trotsky represents the summit of socialist politics and culture in the 20th century. Before 1917 Trotsky elaborated the strategy of the Russian Revolution. During the years of revolution and civil war, he personified the proletariat’s will to victory. And later, in the face of political defeat and isolation, as a hunted exile, Trotsky rose to still greater political and moral heights—as the implacable opponent of the Stalinist counterrevolution and the strategist of the future world socialist revolution.

In a way unequalled by any other figure, Trotsky defined what it meant to be a revolutionary socialist in the 20th century. That Lenin was a towering figure in the history of socialism is beyond dispute. But his life and work are embedded in the Russian Revolution, with all its contradictions. His death in January 1924 came as the reaction against the October Revolution, within the party that he had created, was only beginning to unfold. In the final weeks of his conscious political life, beset with anxiety over the fate of the revolution, Lenin—as documented in his final writings—turned to Trotsky for support. In the struggle against Stalinism, Trotsky’s political work acquired a world historical significance. The Russian Revolution was a great episode in Trotsky's life—an episode in his struggle for the victory of the international working class. Trotsky personified and represented the world socialist revolution. Moreover, in the fight against Stalinism, Trotsky rescued socialism from the abyss into which it had been dragged by the Kremlin gangsters and their political accomplices.

No political tendency that calls itself socialist can define its program, can define its relationship to Marxism today, except through the political conceptions and political struggles developed by Trotsky. The Fourth International, which he founded in 1938, has endured and developed as the political expression of genuine Marxism. Seventy years after his death, Trotsky, the greatest political figure of the last century, remains the most important teacher of socialists in the new century.

Source: World Socialist Web Site