Working Class Monthly Published by the revolutionary soCialist organization

revolutionary SOCIALIST

Issue No. 6 March/April 2012 Price: Donation

Imperialism out of Africa!

one way. Hasnt Uganda just recently discovered oil in its Western part and is expecting 2 billion Dollars oil revenue until 2017? Dictators in Africa Another question that comes to ones mind is: Why Kony? Not that his crimes could in any way be forgiven, but Central Africa hasnt exactly got a good record when it comes to criminal heads of state. Ugandas president, Yoweri Museveni, is one of Africas longest serving dictators and has been trampling human rights since 1986. He came to power after a rebellion against then dictator Milton Obote who came to power in 1979 in a rebellion against former dictator Idi Amin. In the video by Invisible Children it is suggested, that in the conflict in Uganda Joseph Kony was the absolute bad guy. In fact, Musevenis forces did not behave much nicer. Several human rights organizations claim that the Ugandan military forces commonly practise rape. And activists in Uganda report severe human right violations, such as the use of child soldiers, by the Ugandan army! So the good versus bad scenario does not work here, rather, as so often in civil wars, both parties committed atrocities in the interest of the clique they represented. The victim was the Ugandan people being threatened in their livelihoods by both government and rebel forces. And this is another point not mentioned in the film, namely that there is indeed a material root of Konys rebellion. This root is the systematic discrimination of the Southern, economically strong part of Uganda over the North. This dates back to colonial times, when then the Northern Ugandan population was mainly used as slave labour by the British colonialists. is highly dependent on foreign capital. The industry of African countries often relies on a single raw material or agricultural product. In Uganda, these are mainly agricultural products such as tea and coffee, accounting for a third of Ugandas exports. Now obviously oil will get its place too. The profits made in these sectors are mainly taken home by the imperialist capitalists abroad, paid for by extreme poverty in the Third World. In fact over one third of the Ugandan population lives beneath the poverty line of 1.95$ a day. Some of the crumbs of the gigantic profits that the imperialists pour out of Africa are, however, given to the local helpers, the national bourgeoisie. Characteristic for African countries is a very small, highly corrupt bourgeoisie with strong resemblances to a clique. Uganda gets a rating of 2.4 on an international corruption scale, ranging from 1, absolutely corrupt, to 10, not corrupt at all. The countries are made economically and politically dependent on the imperialists. So-called development aid, portrayed as a humanitarian gesture, is one of the main tools to foster dependency. By giving back to these countries some of the revenue taken out of them, the imperialists keep Third World governments in line. Thomas Sankara, progressive leader of Burkina Faso once said: The hand that feeds you controls you. And if these governments dont act as they are supposed to, the development aid is quickly withdrawn. Needless to say that Uganda gets a third of its capital inflow in the form of development aid, and president Museveni is considered a trusted ally in the region.

Kony 2012? First and foremost;

n online video released on the 4th of March has gone viral, depicting the brutality of Ugandan rebel army leader Joseph Kony. Within the first four days on the web over 50 million people had watched the 30-minute long film made by the charity organization Invisible Children. The main topic of the video is an exposition of the crimes committed by Kony, such as child abduction, rape and the mutilation of prisoners. Joseph Konys wide use of child soldiers is also criticized. Many people who have seen the video are outraged at Konys brutal actions, and rightly so. However the video tells only part of the truth, and Invisible Childrens intentions are more than shady.

Ten years after That this video has appeared now is somewhat surprising. The Lords Resistance Army, of which Joseph Kony is the leader, has been around for almost 30 years. The civil war in Uganda reached its high point in 2003, since then the LRA has been defeated majorly. From 2000 onwards, the LRA even had to leave Uganda and has since been operating in a vast area covering parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan and the Central African Republic. It is believed that now Konys LRA consists of no more than 200 1500 soldiers. Frankly there are more kids with guns in the gang parts of Los Angeles. All in all the conflict, is although not finally resolved, pretty much over. Most of the people in Uganda that fled their homes in 2003 have by now returned. So why has the issue all of a sudden come up again? We cant say for sure whether it is just these activists deciding to bring their campaign to Dodgy charity the forefront this year or any other The maker of this rather questionreason. It is interesting however, that able video is a charitable organizathe campaign mainly focuses on the tion called Invisible Children. They presence of US military advisers and present themselves deliberately cool US military help for the Ugandan Caught in the web of Impe- and trendy and rebellious in the video government. Close ties to Uganda rialism to appeal to a lot of young people definitely benefit the US in more than Uganda, as well as Africa in general, who want to change the world for the

better. Behind the scenes the reality looks different. Of the funds raised by Invisible Children only 32% went to actual projects in Uganda. Most of it was spent on film making, travel expenses and not to mention the nice $80,000 salary the three founders of the charity pay themselves. And of the 32% getting to Uganda a lot of it will have ended up in the hands of corrupt government officials, which can not be avoided when working on the ground. After all, the solution they propose, military aid to the Ugandan government, is a bad solution and much more harmful than good. It is pouring fuel into an open conflict, training an army that rapes its own population and regularly breaks up demonstrations of dissidents and even tortures them. Finally with over 300,000 death civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan in mind, the product of former US humanitarian interventions, the US seem to be the least trustworthy when it comes to saving childrens lives. Real Revolution, not facebook revolution! It is not to be doubted that a lot of the young people who shared the Kony 2012 video on their facebook walls had good intentions. Invisible

Children makes use of the rightful disgust many people have about imperialisms plundering in Africa. They focus on the least important figure in the murderous wars for profit and power in Africa and do not speak about the most important and most barbarous one: US Imperialism. The role of facebook and twitter, so emphasized in the Kony 2012 video, is a false solution. We can not go forward seeing protest as something passive, even consumerist (buy the bracelet, the poster etc.) that happens in the virtual world by simply sharing a video. Protest and revolution should be rooted in the real world of material forces. And, rather than the video suggests, people should be active participants, taking their fate into their own hands rather than being pressure groups for politicians. Ending the misery of exploitation and imperialist dominance that has befallen Africa for almost 500 years is an important task ahead. It is however not the task of white, middle class kids in front of their computers but of the working people in Africa themselves. We can help them by fighting imperialism and capitalism here in our country and that way break the capitalist shackles imposed on the Third World.

www.revolutionarysocialism.blogspot.com

Leaving Goldmans
O
n the 14.th of March Greg Smith, an executive director of Goldman Sachs, resigned publicly in the New York Times. He described himself as appalled by the moral bankruptcy displayed by the Wall Street bank. In his letter he layed out how Goldman help themselves before their clients, how promotions are dished out for those who manage to persuade clients to invest in stock or productsthat they are trying to get rid of due to their unlikely profitability. Furthermore, he cited the blatant disrespect for anyone not on board. The shadowy business practices of Goldman Sachs are well known. In April 2011 the Senate permanent subcommittee on investigations accused Goldman of deliberately selling mortgage-linked derivatives at inflated prices after it realised that the housing market was about to crash. The report also alleged that Goldman had attempted to cause as much pain as possible to investors caught on the wrong side of their investments to maximise their own profits. So, there is nothing new there then. What was remarkable was his hark back to the secret sauce that made this place great which had been about teamwork, integrity, a spirit of humility, and always doing right by our clients. It is a commonly held belief that through reform it would be possible to create (or recreate, in the minds of certain capitalists) a friendly, ethical banking system. Unfortunately those who advocate reforming capitalism in the hope that it will bring an end to the selfish and greedy nature of business and provide prosperity for all will be left bitterly disappointed. Due to the very nature of capitalism any reforms that are made can only provide short term benefits, sooner or later any improvements will be cut back in the march towards ever larger profits. The distinct interests of the ruling classes compared to those of workers ensures a conflict that can only be resolved by the working class taking things into their own hands. The initial demands of workers centre around three key demands. The raising of wages, the reduction of working hours without loss of pay and the freedom to organise-primarily to prevent workers from being forced to compete with each other in a race to the bottom. This directly contradicts the desire of the business owners who strive to ensure they obtain larger and larger profit margins. The clear contradictions between workers fighting for more equal conditions and bosses trying to fight for greater personal wealth is just one of a number of contradictions inherent within capitalism. Reforms can help improve conditions in the short term but the unadulterated quest for profit means they will always be rescinded. Reforms won by the workers on one day will be taken from them by the capitalists on another, like those that can be seen today with the ConDem governments onslaught on public services. It is for this reason that the eventual purpose of any workers struggle should be the complete removal of the capitalist system, and in its place a socialist economy thats purpose is not mega profits for a privileged few, but a concerted effort to make the wealth of society available to all. Smiths vision of a secret sauce will do nothing for the lives of workers.

More people without home

L
iving in a city, you might have noticed the increasing number ofhomeless people on the streets. Many of this countrys homeless however, are not the men and women you see sleeping rough, but families in B&Bs and other peoples houses. Last year the number of people officially classed as homeless jumped by 14%. Repossesion and rising unemployment see an increasing number of people with no home to call their own.Some end up on the streets. Others are lucky enough to get a roof over their heads- but only for a short amount of time. In certain areas youll find empty, boarded-up houses scattered round the neighbourhoods, whilst the families that once lived there now sleep on friends sofas, are holed up in B&Bs or live in some other form of temporary accomodation. There is not enough demand for these houses because the people who would need them cant afford them anymore. Currently, there is limited affordable housing and people are being turfed from their homes; so what happens when more and more people cant even find temporary accomodation? Take America for example: the situation is so bad that Hoovervilles (the name for the tent towns and encampments made in public spaces inhabited by the homeless, first cropping up during the Great Depression) are appearing across the country. If nothing is done to stem this rise in homelessness, could we see a similar development in the UK? Of the homeless families, there are 4 million children living in poverty after housing costs have been paid, 1 million in overcrowded spaces and 90,000 in temporary accomodation. Not only do they no longer have anywhere of their own to spend their childhood years, they also become affected by physical and mental health problems. It has been proven that homeless children suffer from insecurity, asthma, poor education and many other problems. All this happens despite the governments pledge in 1999 to end child poverty by 2020. Instead of ending child poverty, the current housing benefit cuts could push more children into poverty. The inherent greed in the current system is being increasingly laid bare for all to see. The government has placed importance on profits over people. With less homeless people than there are empty houses (720,000 homes in November 2011) we should question why the empty houses cant simply be given to those without a home? The answer is that the capitalists would rather see people on the streets than give a house away for free. Not only are there thousands of empty homes, but there are plenty of acres available for building homes on the large estates and second homes of the capitalists. Again, the capitalists would rather see people on the streets than give up their excess land and their second homes. Perhaps we should start taking some advice from Bertolt Brechts poem Resolution of the Communards: Considering that here houses are standing, While you leave us without a place to stay, We decided to install us now there, Because in our holes, it doesnt suit us any more.

On a killing spree in Afghanistan

A
nother month in the decade long imperialist war in Afghanistan, another high profile massacre of innocent Afghan civilians by an American soldier. This time Staff Sergeant Robert Bales of the 3rd Stryker Brigade left the NATO military base in southern Kandahar province in the early hours of Sunday 11 March and broke into the homes of local Afghan villagers living near the base. He then calmly made his way through the hamlet and shot dead 16 people mostly women and children. Its reported that the soldier hunted down members of a family like military targets and that some of his victims were found covered in burn marks inflicted by Bales. This horrific incident, though astonishing, is not unprecedented. It was only in 2010 in the same province that three US Soldiers formed a kill team which murdered three Afghan civilians. Last year a hungover British guardsmen stabbed a 10 year old boy in the kidney for no apparent reason. British soldiers are currently on trial for abusing Afghan children whilst US wikileaks files reported 21 separate incidents of British troops shooting dead or bombing Afghan civilians. The UN reported that last year NATO and its Afghan allies were responsible for 410 civilian deaths, a figure widely agreed to be a gross underestimate of the true number of civilians killed by the occupying forces. Nor is the murder of civilians limited to Afghanistan. The war in Iraq was punctuated by occupation massacres from the start: Haditha, where 24 men, women and children were murdered in cold blood by US marines in 2005, the killing of 17 by Blackwater military contractors in 2007, and another dozen by a US Apache crew in Baghdad the same year are among the more notorious. NATO will no doubt blame the latest massacre on a mentally unstable Robert Bales and wash its hands of all responsibility for the atrocity. The fact though that such horrors occur time and time again during their imperialist occupations prove that they are endemic. Afghanistan is being occupied, not for the good of the Afghan people but due to the strategy of the U.S.A in maintaining its hegemony over the region. It props up one of the most corrupt and unpopular regimes in the world, that of President Karzai, and bombs any opposition into the ground. As of going to press, 404 British soldiers, 1,827 American soldiers and tens of thousands of innocent Afghan civilians have lost their lives during the war. Many more will die before the planned withdrawal of NATO troops in 2014 but nothing will have been achieved, an incredibly sad loss of human life to feed the needs of imperialism.

Who we are
A brief summary of the political positions of the RSO The Revolutionary Socialist Organization (RSO) is fighting against capitalism and for a new socialist economic and social order. Every day it becomes more evident that the so-called free market has nothing to offer for most of the worlds population. Capitalism means hunger, poverty, environmental destruction, war and misery. Even in the richest countries in the world, millions live at or below the poverty line. In contrast, a small portion of the population owns the majority of the assets; in Britain 1% of the population owns more than a third of all assets. Two classes are facing each other in the capitalist society. On one side are the capitalists who own the means of production. They are faced by the wage earners who are forced to sell their labor power. Many workers today are isolated, discouraged, and full of capitalist political ideas and filled with capitalist prejudices. Nevertheless, only the wage earners through strikes and other collective forms of struggle can bring the capitalist mode of production to a halt and hit the capitalist class at the critical point, their profits. Capitalism in its neoliberal phase after the collapse of Stalinism in 1989-91 is politically and militarily on the rise world wide. The working class of the European countries is subject to massive social attacks. Trade unions and social democratic parties are unable to oppose this, but are perfectly integrated into the system. Their representatives participate in cutting public services and creating racist divisions. The Green Parties are not an alternative, they are bourgeois parties, some of which have a progressive rhetoric on human rights issues, but, where they participate in

government, show that they are part of the normal capitalist state. The different imperialist blocs are arming themselves. The imperialist global player is still the United States. But the EU is trying to downsize the military gap with the United States and is also more and more acting as a militarily independent bloc. In contrast, we support the resistance against imperialist wars and occupations and combine this with the slogan: The main enemy is at home. To secure its domination, capitalism is (also) using and fostering the division of the working class. We are fighting against the oppression of people because of their ethnicity, gender, age or sexual orientation and we oppose these divisions with the unconditional support of every fight for equal rights. We are for the socialization of large corporations and their transformation into co-operatives under democratic workers management and control. Capi-

talism can not be eliminated by a few votes or parliamentary reform. All attempts to overcome capitalism through reforms have failed (and have often led to bloody defeats). Only a fundamental upheaval, a revolution based on the active participation of large segments of the population can destroy the state of the ruling class, eliminate the bases of inequality, oppression and exploitation and create a free society. We are Marxists and follow in the tradition of the left opposition against Stalinism by Leon Trotsky. Our alternative is socialism. Our socialism is a free, democratic society built on elected councils. We refer positively to the Russian October Revolution of 1917. This revolution has indeed failed in the Stalinist degeneration in the twenties, but the idea of an alternative to capitalism retains its validity. Our socialism has thus nothing to do with the social

democratic parties, or with the Stalinist dictatorships in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Cuba and China. Capitalism is internationally organized and networked. Therefore, our revolutionary alternative has to be international and internationalist. The RSO is not the revolutionary party. None of the currently existing organizations can claim that for themselves. A new revolutionary party will emerge from a process of transformations and mergers. The RSO will try to play a positive role in this process to build such a party and therefore put forward a revolutionary alternative to capitalism. If you are interested in this project, then get in contact with us and support us in building a revolutionary and socialist organization!

Contact: If you want to know more about the Revolutionary Socialist Organisation, check out our English website: www.revolutionarysocialism.blogspot.com or e-mail us at: revolutionarysocialist@gmx.com or just simply talk to the person who sold you this paper.