Relentless Imperialism

Western Sahara is the last colony in Africa, and therefore is an urgent piece of unfinished business for all of us. An SACP delegation led by General Secretary Dr Blade Nzimande went there very recently and this visit is the basis for the new Umsebenzi Online. See the link below.

President Fidel Castro of Cuba has caught the attention of the world once again with his denunciation of the Imperialist plan to marketise staple foods as energy feedstock, thereby inevitably pricing the staple diet of billions of poor people worldwide out of their reach. President Castro has a deep knowledge and understanding of the relationship between people, agriculture and food. Click here for an account by Saul Landau of a jeep trip with Fidel in rural Cuba nearly 40 years ago, when in Fidel’s tent the “lantern burned when all the others had gone out” while he studied agricultural texts.

Fidel does not mince his words. In Africa, where the preferred grain for energy, namely maize (“corn”) is the staple food of hundreds of millions of families, we are in mortal danger. See the link below.

Mervyn Bennun, back in South Africa, is a revolutionary lawyer who yesterday soberly and with great clarity, exposed the worm at the heart of the National Prosecuting Authority. If ever there was a “seminal text” (a high point, or watershed) of our constitutional history, this must be it. Hic Rhodus! Hic Salta! See the link below.

It may be supposed that the principle business of Imperialism is its confrontation with the world’s working class. This is not necessarily true, however, at a tactical level at any given point in time. The case of South Korea, as described by Tim Shorrock, illustrates this well. Although South Korea as a separate nation-state is the product of an anti-communist war in the early 1950s, yet this supposedly “pro-Western” bastion has been continuously subjected to aggressive Imperialist machinations aimed at ruining its national bourgeoisie and expropriating its best assets for the benefit of US transnational corporations. See the link below.

Time and again (e.g. in Afghanistan, Iraq and now Somalia, to mention only three) the Imperialists have sold out their bourgeois allies, and even gone to war against them, for the advantage of global corporate business. Imperialist wars against national bourgeois regimes have been far more common than wars against proletarian socialist countries. If South Africa is to mount a challenge to Imperilist hegemony in the form of a truly (“economically”) independent development path, we will have to expect a similar reaction.

Our President, Thabo Mbeki, received a South Korean minister yesterday. Let us hope that the discussion went along good strong anti-Imperialist lines.

Some people continue to report trouble opening the CU links, which nearly always go to the site http://amadlandawonye.wikispaces.com/ . After long consideration of this problem, it appears that it is in two related parts. Firstly, the site can be slow to open, if the connection is less than perfect. The page appears solid red for a long time. But it usually does open, if you leave it long enough.

The reason why people feel they cannot wait for it to open may be simply that they have not yet got the idea of using multiple open windows in their browser (whether Internet Explorer or any other, such as Firefox). If you can continue to work in another window while amadlandawonye is opening in the first one, then the pressure is off and you can afford to leave it and come back to it after a few minutes, in the reasonable expectation that it will open. Interent Explorer version 7 provides very good means to assist of multiple-window browzing. In any case, please be patient, comrades.

“12%” refers to the wage claim within the joint public sector bargaining position.

Click on these links:

Western Sahara not Morocco bantustan, Umsebenzi Online (2196 words)

Immediate energy revolution, President Fidel Castro, Granma (2039 words)

Mud in the waters of justice in SA, Mervyn Bennun, Business Day (2172 words)

US Corporate Trade Policy in Korea, Tim Shorrock, Counterpunch (3402 words)