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commies
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Americans seem to have an obsession to limiting things to pairs...
There's only room for two parties and two genders and two economic systems.
I hope someone else starts running things soon.
There's only room for two parties and two genders and two economic systems.
I hope someone else starts running things soon.
Eltitoguay
Well-known member
A Black Panther in Franco's Madrid
By Jordi Chantres
BLACK PANTHER PARTY WOMEN ACTIVISTS (1969).
In 1967, Roberta Alexander, a Black Panther activist, held a rally at the University of Madrid against the Vietnam War. The event ended with protests, communist flags and riots in the streets of the city centre. After singing "We shall overcome" in the basement of the DGS (Dirección General de Segurida) she was expelled from the country.
It is an unusual chapter of Francoist dissidence in the heart of Francoism: a black militant of the then newly formed Black Panthers who gave a rally at a Madrid university and, for several weeks, kept Francoism in check .
Her testimony tells us about the famous "jumps" (meetings with the intention of demonstrating that lasted minutes until the armed police arrived and dispersed them with blood and fire), but also about the impetus of the radicalized students, who did not hesitate to take over the campus and demonstrate in front of the United States institutions in Madrid to protest against the Vietnam War, which had become the great internationalist cause of the second half of the sixties.
FROM BERKELEY'S PACIFISM TO THE MADRID OF THE GRAYS:
BLACK PANTHER ACTIVIST AT A PROPAGANDA TABLE (1969). PHOTOGRAPH: DAVID FENTON
Roberta was not a newcomer to activism. Before joining the Panthers, she had participated in the Free Speech Movement , the civil rights movement that emerged in Berkeley.
However, her visit to Spain in the midst of the dictatorship was an experience that had an impact on her.
She knew nothing about our country. She was fascinated by the Civil War and the role of the International Brigades (her uncle had belonged to the Lincoln Brigade, made up entirely of blacks), but little else.
ROBERTA ALEXANDER DURING AN EVENT IN GERMANY. PHOTO: REBELIÓN
She did not travel alone. She was accompanied by two friends, all of them communists . After a long journey by boat (she left New York and, after stopping in Dover, arrived in Le Havre, France, from where she took a train and landed in Madrid), she arrived as an exchange student at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, which gave her a certain protection . After all, she was a foreign national from a country like the United States, with which, from 1960, Franco's regime, aware of the need to seek economic openness, signed a trade agreement. Franco was trying to "normalize" his international relations. Among other things, the pact meant the publication of numerous American writers through the United States Information Service of the Embassy (John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Erskine Cladwell, John Steinbeck, James T. Farrell, Pearl S. Buck or John P. Marquand, among others).
As soon as she arrived, she was greeted by Carlos Blanco, a Marxist, writer, literary critic and director of the exchange program. Roberta did not know that he would be instrumental in the events that were to come.
The first few weeks were strange. She was determined to get involved in political activism despite the repression, but she was unable to find any leftist groups. “At first I couldn’t find the political people, because the students would throw out leaflets and disappear, there would be a demonstration and they would disappear, I couldn’t find out who was behind it, or meet anyone,” she told Luis Martín-Cabrera in an interview published in Rebelión in October 2011. Carlos Blanco secretly organized the students, who were planning a boycott of Ronald Reagan’s visit to Madrid. They would go to the airport to greet him with banners, but the trip was eventually cancelled . Without hesitation, some mornings she set up several information tables at the entrance to the faculty denouncing the war. It was then that, in order to put pressure on the Spanish government not to renew its agreements with the United States on the use of its military bases in Spain, especially in Torrejón de Ardoz, a campaign against the Vietnam War and imperialism was organized that would begin on April 28.
THE BLACK PANTHER WHO SPOKE TO THE STUDENTS OF MADRID:
"You have to get out from behind those bushes, we have a taxi waiting for you; the best thing is that you go to Andalusia for a couple of weeks until they forget about you."
Roberta, although with reservations, agreed to speak at a rally at the university. The idea was to speak only about the United States, but not to make any reference to Franco. Outside, some groups were burning American flags , while the hall was packed (between 400 and 500 people). Everyone was looking towards the door, waiting to see the police enter. Roberta spoke excitedly. The audience, which had a real panther in front of it, burst into a great ovation.At the end, what seemed almost inevitable arrived :
«I was already getting ready to leave when a small group of students, led by Fini Rubio, came up to me and said: “You have to go behind those bushes, we have a taxi waiting for you; the best thing is to go to Andalusia for a couple of weeks until they forget about you .” This didn’t seem like a very promising plan [laughs]. I hadn’t thought much further, it hadn’t occurred to me what would happen after the speech, until these students told me that they had a taxi waiting for me. In this sense, I was quite naive. I knew that the Andalusia plan wasn’t going to work, so I went to my small apartment and then I spoke to my friend, Karen Winn, who was still living in a boarding house. Karen was blonde and Carol Watanabe was of Japanese origin. They had both helped me set up the tables for the petition, but they hadn’t made any speeches. The woman at Karen’s pension told us that the police had come to get us and that she had told them that we would be back in four hours so that we would have time to escape. We packed quickly and called Carlos Blanco and asked him, “What do we do now?” “Come to my house immediately ,” he said. We grabbed a taxi just at siesta time and suddenly on the radio there was something about “the colored girl, the blonde and the Japanese girl from Berkeley who have insulted Spanish hospitality.” The taxi driver must have been a legit guy because he looked in the rearview mirror and realized who his clients were. He dropped us off at Carlos Blanco’s house where we spent 2 or 3 days. At the Blancos’ house it became clear that they were not going to just forget about us so we decided to go back to our respective places of lodging. I returned to my apartment and was there eating a yogurt when two men in plain clothes knocked on the door and said, “Are you Roberta Alexander?” which was little more than a joke. I said yes and they told me that I was under arrest . I asked why and they told me: “We don't know why, the American Embassy sent him to us.”
UNREST IN THE CENTER: THE BLACK FIST FLYING OVER THE CAPITAL:
Roberta was under arrest, the first and last time a Black Panther was arrested in Franco's Spain .
However, while she was being taken to police stations in various parts of Madrid, more things were happening.
The Diario de Burgos , in its April 29 edition, recounts what happened:
"Student demonstration in Madrid “against the US policy in Vietnam” :
"It seems that it was young Americans who took the initiative for the organization.
Madrid (Cifra).
— Several hundred students met this morning at the Faculty of Political and Economic Sciences to demonstrate against American policy in Vietnam. In the classroom where the meeting took place, North Vietnamese flags, portraits of President Johnson and slogans against the policy and action of the United States in South-West Asia were displayed. Clippings from foreign newspapers about "bombing of civilian populations" were read, as well as statements by Ho-Chi-Minh, the Englishman Bertrand Russell and a group of so-called Spanish Intellectuals who were taking part in the demonstration.
A black American student from the University of Berkeley, Roberta Alexander, who is in Spain on a university exchange, spoke out against American intervention in Vietnam and referred to racial discrimination in the United States. Among those attending the meeting there was a large number of American students who are studying in Spain under agreements established for student exchanges. It is understood that it was from these student groups that the directive for the preparation and organisation of these demonstrations against the policy of their own country in Vietnam arose, seeking the collaboration of some Spanish students. The student Roberta Alexander had recently published a letter in the New York Herald Tribune in which she tried to justify the disturbances in Madrid. Confirming the letter were other American students Carol Batanave and Karen Win. The latter comes from the Californian University of Berkeley and has declared to a foreign agency in Madrid: " We will not participate in the demonstration because if the blond hair stands out too much" , although she admitted that American students had participated in the organisation of this demonstration against the United States, for its policy in Vietnam."
ROBERTA ALEXANDER ON THE LEFT OF THE IMAGE WITH HER FIST RAISED
« A hundred students burned American flags that had painted on them and some drawn portraits of President Johnson»
"At the end of this meeting, around a hundred students, led by others carrying banners against President Johnson and the United States policy, went to the esplanade of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, where they burned some American flags painted on them and some drawn portraits of President Johnson . The smoke produced by the bonfire approached the group of public forces on normal law enforcement duty, at which point the students dispersed without any need for a request or intervention by the authorities. In the afternoon, around eight o'clock, a few hundred students, divided into small groups, positioned themselves around the United States Embassy on Serrano Street in an attempt to demonstrate. The public forces were guarding the political representation and, faced with the attitude of some of the groups of not disbanding while shouting "imperialists", they were forced to charge. The incidents were divided along Calle Serrano and its tributaries, such as the intersection of Calle Serrano and Calle Goya, where a small group set fire to several newspapers. Here, too, the police were forced to intervene, as they did in response to the actions of another group located at the intersection of Calle Serrano and Calle Hermosilla and Calle Claudio Coello and Calle Goya. It is known that, as a result of all these disturbances, the police have made several arrests. The disturbances, on the other hand, affected traffic in the area , which is always very intense and even more so at the time of day when they occurred, which caused several traffic jams. By early evening, normality had been completely restored."
PROTESTS IN THE SPANISH COMMUNIST PRESS IN EXILE. ABOVE, STUDENTS (SOME WITH THEIR FACES COVERED) DEMONSTRATE. BELOW, POLICE CHARGES BREAKING UP THE MARCH ( LPE , MAY 15, 1967)
ROBERTA GIVES A SPEECH AT AN EVENT HELD IN THE UNITED STATES, AFTER HER RETURN FROM MADRID, AGAINST THE VIETNAM WAR AND THE AMERICAN BASES IN SPAIN ( ESPAÑA POPULAR , AUGUST 15, 1968)
"WE SHALL OVERCOME" PLAYS AT THE GENERAL SECURITY DIRECTORATE:
Roberta herself continues the story in her interview:
«Although it may seem incredible, we walked from my little apartment in Callao to the Puerta del Sol and in my memory we even stopped for a coffee. Strange, isn’t it? It seems incredible now, but that’s how I remember it and how I’ve told it, walking with the Francoist police to the Puerta del Sol. Anyway, they put me in the General Directorate of Security and it really was like going down to the dungeons of a castle. They put me in a cell by myself and by then I was starting to get a little scared, although Carlos had told us that if they arrested us he would keep an eye on us, it was the only connection he had with the outside world that could protect us at that moment […]
I remember that someone started singing a song that sounded familiar to me from the movement , but as I am from a later American generation, I didn’t recognize it immediately, but I started humming it with him and one of the guards came up to me, really angry: “Why are you singing that song?” And that’s when I realized it was “The Internationale.”
“While I was in detention, I pretended as much as I could that I couldn’t speak Spanish, I would tell them, ‘I don’t know what that is,’ and they would leave. Nothing happened to me, physically or otherwise. Then someone noticed that there was an American woman in the cells.
I didn’t see any other prisoners, but it was full, because they had arrested a lot of people just before May Day, they were preventive arrests.
Then someone started singing ‘We shall overcome’ [the anthem of the Civil Rights Movement led by Martin Luther King], they couldn’t silence us and we were singing in English! I think it was in English.”
Video of a recent lecture by Roberta Alexander on the Black Panthers:
The embassy managed to press for her release. She was placed under house arrest pending her deportation, which took place at the beginning of May. A dozen police officers accompanied her to the train that would take her to Irún. At the station in Madrid, there were apparently some charges against students who came to say goodbye to her and protest against her deportation. At the border in Irún, the agents verified that they had crossed the border. Already in Hendaye, a group of people were waiting for her with some money and the contact information of friends in Paris, who would also help her. In the French capital she gave an interview to CBS and, back home, her case made the front page of the Los Angeles Times .
Some time later, she wrote a letter to the editor of the newspaper Ya , which was published in its section “See it and... tell it .” An American sympathizer of the regime had written a letter accusing her of disloyalty and treason. The response is this:
"Dear Sir:
I am writing this letter in response to the letter published in your newspaper on June 14, which referred to the "misconduct" of myself and the two other girls expelled from Spain. I do not think that the lady who wrote the letter fully understands our position regarding the Vietnam War. I believe that the American people must always express their opinions. We say that we have a democracy, but we must bear in mind that the word democracy has no meaning without the freedom to express different opinions. Those of us who criticize the role of the United States in the war and who protest against the injustices of our society are not "social defects" but true patriots and democrats. I think that the Vietnamese people, like all peoples of the world, have the right to determine their own government without military intervention by the United States. Who receives the advantages and who pays the price of war? The young black man may fight in Vietnam against colored people, but in his own country he lives as an inferior citizen. That is why I protest against the war. I just hope that the people of the world, especially the American people, will take a second look and think a little more about our country's policy in Vietnam.
ROBERTA ALEXANDER
Roberta Alexander telling the story of her deportation
to a group of brigadier of the LIncoln
to a group of brigadier of the LIncoln
ROBERTA, SECOND FROM LEFT, RAISES HER FIST DURING A CONFERENCE ON BLACK POWER.
Una pantera negra en el Madrid franquista — Agente Provocador
En 1967 Roberta Alexander, militante de Panteras Negras, dio un mitin en la universidad madrileña contra la guerra de Vietnam. El acto acabó con cargas, banderas comunistas y disturbios en las calles del centro. Tras cantar «We shall overcome» en los sótanos de la DGS fue expulsada del país
www.agenteprovocador.es
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Eltitoguay
Well-known member
Interview with Roberta Alexander, a living history of activism in the US (1 of 4):
By Luis Martín-Cabrera | 04/10/2011 | USASources: Rebellion
Intro:
Often the news we receive from the United States has to do with the multiple war fronts opened by the empire, the religious fanaticism of the evangelical right, junk food, the sexual scandals in public life, its regressive puritanism, the stupidity of its television series, its self-assigned role as global police or its insistence on perpetuating a global capitalist system of exploitation and destruction of the planet. Outside the United States, even large sectors of the left, when they think of the “belly of the monster” as Martí called it, imagine white, upper-middle-class Americans, obese, ignorant of everything that happens outside their country, concerned only with continuing to fill their refrigerators with food and the gas tanks of their trucks, completely oblivious to the bloody origin of the oil that sustains their American way of life .
There is no doubt that this reality exists, but the country is much more heterogeneous than we imagine outside its borders. In addition to the complacent white middle class and the plutocracy in power, there are other realities in the United States, those of those who suffer firsthand the oppressive and exploitative policies of the United States, the voice of those below, the rebellious dignity of those who resist and fight from within to overthrow a fundamentally unjust, structurally racist, compulsively exploitative and irremediably oppressive system. The purpose of this series of interviews is precisely to make known beyond the borders of the United States the political subjectivities of those of us who fight from within, knowing that a better and more just world is impossible without a radical change within the United States.
No one better to inaugurate this series of interviews from the “heart of the beast” than Roberta Alexander. Roberta Alexander is the daughter of a communist couple, the product of an interracial relationship when marriages between whites and African-Americans were prohibited, a militant herself of the Communist Party of the United States, a member of the WE Dubois Club, of the Black Panthers, an activist in the student movement in Berkeley, an English teacher in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods, Director of the English Department in one of the most combative University Schools in the district of San Diego, a living history of militancy in California and in the United States. If it were not too disrespectful I would even say that reading these interviews and, hopefully in the very near future, the memoirs she is writing, is very close to a revolutionary version of the movie Forrest Gump , except that here Roberta Alexander is not just a passive or unconscious witness, but an active participant in a turbulent and hopeful time.
The conversations with Roberta Alexander extend over several sessions and the hours seem like minutes, because they are filled with countless anecdotes and moments that convey the rage and dignity of the shared struggle; other voices speak through her words, the aspirations and hopes of the most humble, the most oppressed hearts that do not appear in the history books, but who have opened more paths than any national hero or industrial titan. Like many of the most dedicated activists, Roberta Alexander does not have the feeling that her life or her activism are particularly important. Readers of these interviews will be able to see to what extent she is wrong in this. Once one begins to pull the thread of the story, her irrepressible loquacity, her irremediable sense of humor in the face of the most adverse circumstances (I have not been able to transcribe all the laughter that punctuated our conversations), and her political courage stay with us forever. I hope that at least a trace of that intensity remains in these interviews:
"We had above all a deep appreciation, respect and affinity for the working class of all colours and ethnic groups."
Continue:
Interview with Roberta Alexander, a living history of activism in the US (2 of 4):
"The Spanish guards told us over and over again that they knew nothing about our situation, that they were following orders from the American Embassy."
Continue:Interview with Roberta Alexander, a living history of activism in the US (3 of 4):
«Bobby Seale talked about sharing the pie, but I didn't want a piece of the pie, I wanted to overthrow capitalism»
Continue:Interview with Roberta Alexander, a living history of activism in the US (4 and the end):
«Lubumba-Zapata was the only place that taught history from the perspective of blacks, Chicanos, and working-class whites.»
Continue:
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Eltitoguay
Well-known member
In line with your question, I also wonder what would have happened to my family (middle or lower-middle working class) if I had lived in the United States, with the current prostate cancer that my elderly father is going through, and overcoming. Such a complex treatment, with so many drugs and sessions with expensive localized radiotherapy equipment... I wonder how much that would cost in the US... Here it is practically free. And let's not talk about diseases that are even more complex and/or economically expensive to treat...
Of course, in the area of Dentistry, and in Psychology & Psychiatry (not related with drugs addictions problems) the service is very basic, and for complicated things, you end up resorting to Private Healthcare.
In the case of my country, it has been an achievement of the left's struggle that has been built since 1908. The right does not dare publicly to be against it and demagogically claims in public that it wants to maintain the model, but tries to boycott it when it governs, allocating more and more of the public money for universal and free public healthcare, to promoting and financing private healthcare (in the one that usually has economic interest) and the "concerted" one (public means, private means of payment).
In fact, during the previous Government of Mariano Rajoy and the Popular Party, they dismantled everything they could from Public Health, and there were shady deals with Private Health.
Here is a Wikipedia summary of the history and how the Public Health System works:
The National Health System is the body that encompasses the health benefits and services in Spain that, according to law, are the responsibility of the public authorities. Created in 1908, it gradually extended its coverage, subject to payment for the healthcare services, to the entire Spanish population. In 1989 this process was completed; since then, healthcare in Spain has been universal and supported through different types of taxes.
In Spain, in accordance with the principle of decentralization promulgated by the Constitution and after the dissolution of INSALUD in 2002, health care competence is transferred to each of the Autonomous Communities . The central government only provides this service directly in Ceuta and Melilla (the two smallest Autonomous Communietes, on the northwestern Mediterranean coast of Africa), through the National Institute of Health Management (INGESA) and carries out general and basic tasks between the different Communities.
History and regulatory framework
Public intervention in community health problems was always a matter of interest, expressed fundamentally in the control of epidemics , or at least in the minimum capacity of control allowed by naval quarantines , the closing of the walls [ 2 ] and the prohibition of communications [ 3 ] with cities affected by the plague , and other types of measures that were supposed to be hygienic or palliative.) After the flourishing of medicine in al-Andalus and the outstanding contribution of the Jews during the Late Middle Ages , the institutionalization of the protomedicato took place in the time of Charles I. But the practice of the medical profession, which was accessed through the faculties of medicine from the medieval university, was highly decentralized and had organizations such as medical colleges . Surgery and pharmacy were disciplines well differentiated from medicine, and much less prestigious, within the Galenic-Hippocratic paradigm dominant during most of the Ancien Régime in Spain .The novatores of the late 17th century had medicine as one of their main fields of action, which was limited to individual and localized initiatives, which the Spanish Enlightenment of the second half of the 18th century developed with more continuity ( College of Surgery of San Carlos , etc.) At the beginning of the 19th century , the Royal Philanthropic Vaccine Expedition (1803) constituted the most ambitious public health project on a planetary level.
Already in the Contemporary Age , during the liberal triennium , they discussed the Health Code of 1822 , which was not approved due to the lack of scientific and technical consensus on the means that should be provided. Already in the period called progressive biennium , the Law of November 28, 1855 [ 4 ] consecrates the General Directorate of Health , created very few years before, and which will have a long organizational continuity. The Royal Decree of January 12, 1904 , which approves the General Instruction of Health, barely altered the organizational scheme of 1855 (changing the name of the General Directorate of Health for the General Inspection of Health from time to time).
On July 11, 1934, during the Second Spanish Republic the Law of Health Coordination was enacted, with the fundamental objective of accentuating the incipient state intervention in the organization of local health services; it proposes the creation of the Ministry of Health. [ 5 ]
After the Spanish Civil War , with the Franco dictatorship, the 1944 Law of Bases perpetuated the previous structure: [ 6 ]
The Law of December 14, in 1942 created the Compulsory Sickness Insurance SOE , under the management of the National Institute of Social Security , a system of coverage of health risks through a quota linked to work, restructured in the General Law of Social Security of 1974. [ 7 ] Social Security was assuming an increasing number of pathologies within its benefits table, as well as covering a greater number of people and groups. However, a WHO report in 1967 detected important deficiencies in the system [ 8 ]
With the democracy, the General Health Law (April 25, 1986) [ 9 ] and the creation of Health Departments and a Ministry of Health , are a response to the provisions on public health of the Spanish Constitution of 1978 in articles 43 and 49 establishes the right of all citizens to health protection and title VIII, which provides for the powers in matters of health of the autonomous communities .
General Health Law 14/1986
The General Health Law was formulated for two reasons, the first of which is that it originates from a mandate of the Spanish Constitution, since both Article 43 and Article 49 of the fundamental normative text establish the right of all citizens to health protection. The Law recognizes the right to obtain health system benefits for all citizens and foreigners residing in Spain.The second reason is of an organisational nature, since Title VIII of the Constitution confers broad powers on the autonomous communities in the area of health. The autonomous communities have a primary importance in the organisation of health care and the Law allows the implementation of the processes of transfer of services, a health care system sufficient to meet the health needs of the population resident in their respective jurisdictions. Article 149.1.16 of the Constitution, on which this Law is based, establishes the principles and substantive criteria that allow the new health care system to be given general and common characteristics that are the foundation of health services throughout the territory of the State.
The administrative tool proposed by the Law is the configuration (it does not create it, it only configures it), [ 10 ] of a National Health System . The axis of the model that the law adopts is that the autonomous communities are sufficiently endowed and with the necessary territorial perspective, so that the benefits of autonomy are not compromised by the needs of efficiency in management.
Health services are therefore concentrated under the responsibility of the autonomous communities and under the powers of direction, in the basic sense, and the coordination of the State. The creation of the respective health services of the autonomous communities has been carried out gradually as the transfers in the area of Health were carried out.
The Health Law was supplemented in 2003 by Law 16/2003 on cohesion and quality of the National Health System , [ 11 ] which, while maintaining the basic lines of the Law, modified and expanded the article to adapt it to the new social and political reality in force in Spain.
General Law on Social Security
Royal Legislative Decree 1/1994, of June 20, approving the revised text of the General Law on Social Security, in its Chapter IV deals with protective action . This includes:- Health care in cases of maternity , illness (common or occupational) and accidents , whether or not they are work-related.
- Professional recovery , the provenance of which is appreciated in any of the mentioned cases
- Economic benefits in situations of temporary disability ; maternity; paternity ; risk during pregnancy ; risk during breastfeeding ; care of minors affected by cancer or another serious illness ; disability , in its contributory and non-contributory modalities; retirement , in its contributory and non-contributory modalities ; unemployment, in its contributory and assistance levels ; death and survival ; as well as those granted in the contingencies and special situations that are determined by regulation.
Law 16/2003 on cohesion and quality of the National Health System
This Law was promoted in 2003 when all the autonomous communities gradually assumed responsibilities in the area of health and a stable model of financing of all the assumed responsibilities was established.Several years have passed since the General Health Law came into force, and profound changes have taken place in society, both culturally, technologically and socio-economically, as well as in the way of living and becoming ill. And new challenges have arisen for the organisation of the National Health System.
For all these reasons, this law establishes actions for coordination and cooperation between public health administrations as a means of ensuring citizens' right to health protection, with the common objective of guaranteeing equity, quality and social participation in the National Health System.
The Law defines a common core of action for the National Health System and the health services that comprise it. Without interfering in the diversity of organizational, management and service delivery formulas inherent to a decentralized State, it is intended that citizen care by public health services respond to basic and common guarantees.
The areas of collaboration between public health administrations defined by this law are: the services of the National Health System; pharmacy; health professionals; research; the health information system; and the quality of the health system.
In this way, the law creates or strengthens specialized bodies, which are open to the participation of the autonomous communities; such as the Technology Assessment Agency, the Spanish Agency for Medicines and Health Products , the Human Resources Commission, the Health Research Advisory Commission, the Carlos III Health Institute , the Health Information Institute, the National Health System Quality Agency [ 12 ] and the National Health System Observatory.
The basic organ of cohesion is the Interterritorial Council of the National Health System of Spain , which is provided with greater agility in decision-making and mechanisms for seeking consensus, as well as for the link between the parties in the assumption of these decisions. The system includes the High Inspection, which is assigned the monitoring of the agreements of that one, among other functions. [ 13 ]
Spanish health coverage:
The beneficiaries of the public health benefit are all Spaniards in accordance with the provisions of Chapter III of the Spanish Constitution approved in 1978. Specifically, it establishes that: [ 18 ]- Article 41: The public authorities shall maintain a public social security system for all citizens, guaranteeing adequate social assistance and benefits in situations of need, especially in the case of unemployment. Assistance and complementary benefits shall be free.
- Article 43: The right to health protection is recognized. It is the responsibility of the public authorities to organize and protect public health through preventive measures and the necessary benefits and services. The Law shall establish the rights and duties of all in this regard. The public authorities shall promote health education, physical education and sport.
- Article 49. The public authorities shall implement a policy of prevention, treatment, rehabilitation and integration of the physically, sensorially and mentally handicapped.
| This article or section is out of date. |
- Article 3. Foreigners shall enjoy in Spain, on equal terms with Spaniards, the rights and freedoms recognized in Title I of the Constitution and in its implementing laws, in the terms established in this Organic Law.
- Article 10. Foreigners shall have the right to engage in paid activity on their own or as an employee, as well as to access the Social Security System, under the terms provided for in this Organic Law and in the provisions that develop it.
- Article 12. Foreigners who are in Spain and registered in the municipal register of their habitual residence have the right to health care under the same conditions as Spaniards. Foreigners who are in Spain have the right to emergency public health care in the event of serious illness or accident, whatever the cause, and to the continuity of such care until they are discharged from the hospital. Foreigners under eighteen years of age who are in Spain have the right to health care under the same conditions as Spaniards. Pregnant foreign women who are in Spain have the right to health care during pregnancy, childbirth and the postpartum period.
Financing of Public Health
Article 10 of the Law on cohesion and quality of the National Health System establishes that the financing of Public Health in Spain is the responsibility of the autonomous communities in accordance with the transfer agreements and the current system of autonomous financing, without prejudice to the existence of a third party obliged to pay. The sufficiency for the financing of the benefits is determined by the resources assigned to the autonomous communities in accordance with the provisions of the autonomous financing laws. The financing of health care derived from professional contingencies is through premiums for work accidents and occupational diseases. It is provided by the public health service at the expense of the managing entity (INSS or ISM) or the mutual or collaborating company (in this case directly) with whom the company or the worker, in the case of self-employed workers who opt for coverage of professional risks, have agreed to cover professional contingencies. The inclusion of a new benefit in the catalogue of benefits of the National Health System will be accompanied by an economic report containing the assessment of the positive or negative impact that it may entail. This report will be submitted to the Fiscal and Financial Policy Council for analysis and approval, if appropriate.Privatization of health care
With the approval in 1997 of Law 15/1997 on new forms of management of health centres, the door was opened in Spain to the construction of new privately managed public hospitals paid for with public funds and to the privatisation of the management of health care or non-health care services, depending on each case. Thus, in 1999, the Alcira Hospital was the first public hospital in Spain in which its management was privatised, and therefore, its health care staff . Likewise, various communities governed by the Popular Party carried out initiatives to build privately managed public hospitals under the legal formula of health foundations, of which the Calahorra Hospital (La Rioja) is an example .On November 1, 2012, Ignacio González , President of the Community of Madrid , announced during the presentation of the 2013 Budget Project the privatization of the management of six hospitals in the community and 10% of the primary care centers in the region, including the health personnel . This measure has mainly affected the Hospital de La Princesa , where various demonstrations have taken place. [ 44 ] [ 45 ] [ 46 ]
In Spain, private healthcare is defended by certain pressure groups and lobbies, representatives of insurance companies and hospital groups. Among them is the Idis Foundation, directed by Juan Abarca Cidón , [ 47 ] which was very present during the Covid-19 pandemic to obtain various contracts with the regional health system. [ 48 ]
Suspension of the trial in Madrid
On 27 January 2014, the then President of the Community of Madrid , Ignacio González , announced that the project to privatise the management of six public hospitals was being suspended , following the decision of the High Court of Justice of the Community of Madrid to halt the process. He then said that he had accepted the resignation of the Minister of Health Javier Fernández-Lasquetty , the main person responsible for the project - which had encountered strong opposition among healthcare personnel and users of Madrid's public health system in the so-called white tide -. [ 49 ] However, the hospitals previously created with this type of formula did not revert to pure public management. It should be noted that the reversion of privatised services to public management presents major legal problems, particularly in the management of personnel, as the Valencian Government found out when it recovered management of the Alcira Hospital .More:
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Eltitoguay
Well-known member
Yes, it's good, yes, je, je...man you're doing the meme LOL!
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Eltitoguay
Well-known member
(...)"In principle principle, the Spanish section of the Black Panther Party was not created to take revenge on the Nazis , but because Spain was diluting blacks in the Hispanic world, denying them"(...)The Black Panthers in Spain: how the revolutionary vanguard that fought Nazi and racist attacks was formed
By Henrique Marino.
Madrid; 04/25/2024
Beatings, racism and political awareness led several young of Equatorial Guineans origins, to create "a secret self-defense strategy" against the rise of the far right in the 1990s.
Members of the Black Panthers of Zaragoza, in 1992. — Black Panthers Archive
In the early 1990s, nazi skinheads were rampant in Madrid and other cities. Fed up with racist attacks and insults, the young people of the black movement decided to organize and develop a "collective strategy based on self-defense against the impunity of Nazi terrorism." This is how the Black Panthers were born in Spain, although the embryo had been conceived years before in the context of student protests — whose punk icon was Cojo Manteca —, the rise of hip hop and the fury of street gangs.
However, they needed an organisation that would unite its members and leaders who would instil in them an ideology and a conscience to undertake the racial struggle. Abuy Nfubea , a young man of Equatorial Guinean origin, was one of those responsible for recruiting and training subversive, committed and combative elements to provide cadres for the Black Panthers, recognised in 1994 as the Spanish section of the American New Black Panther Party.
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Nuevo Partido Pantera Negra - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre
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He knew the theory, but it was time to put it into practice. He and other comrades had been immersed in the doctrine of Malcolm X and had read Kwame Ture's book Black Power , although they were aware that the cause was fragmented and needed the glue of what would later become the Black Panthers, whose first state congress was held in 1992. The setting was Alcalá de Henares, which housed two institutions that were decisive for the development of the movement: the campus of the Universidad Laboral and the Pedro Gumiel Institute.
"Malcolm X was inspired by rap and by the Torrejón de Ardoz air base, where we went to the Stone's nightclub , which was frequented by Americans. In addition to his autobiography, we read the magazines Mundo Negro , Tam-Tam and África Negra ," explains Abuy Nfubea, who set out to spread his thesis beyond academic circles and onto the streets. Not only to gangs, but also to other types of brotherhoods, as there was a seed of protest among grassroots Christians and other groups.
On campus, he says, a confrontation arose between two factions: "The black Uncle Toms , kneeling and colonised, who were around the Colegio Mayor Nuestra Señora de África [attached to the Complutense University of Madrid]; and other more radical, politically aware and from a lower social class, who were around the Universidad Laboral de Alcalá and Father Asier." Although Abuy Nfubea was a middle-class lad educated by the Jesuits, he converted to the working-class and pan-Africanist cause.
While some classified his people as immigrants or, at best, as black citizens, he advocated the concept of a black community. The different perspectives when it came to tackling the social struggle against racism came from a long time ago and, in today's eyes, can seem shocking and contradictory. There were organizations linked to Catholics and evangelicals - and even related to Opus Dei - as well as militants from right-wing and left-wing parties, both Spanish and Equatorial Guinean.
In fact, the fathers of several members of the Black Panthers were Francoists and some were military men, such as the grandfather of Enrique Okenve Martínez or the father of Javier Siale Bonaba, an anti-fascist ska fan who was a member of the Sharps (Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice).
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For his part, Abuy Nfubea is the grandson of a procurator of the Francoist courts and the son of the founder of Unión Popular, a conservative party that inherited various pro-independence political parties in Equatorial Guinea.
With a background in opposition to dictators Macías and Obiang, as well as the Free Mandela movement , those boys knew or lived through some founding milestones that preceded the creation of the Black Panthers, such as the sexual assault of two Guinean women in Móstoles during the 1982 World Cup in Spain, the reaction to which was the birth of the Black Panthers Feminist Collective; or the campaign against the withdrawal of the black man from Banyoles and the subsequent defence of his liberator, the Haitian Alphonce Arcelín.
The attack on the South African embassy to denounce apartheid in 1986 was also notorious, which later motivated the creation of the solidarity committee with Marcelino Bondjale, leader of Maleva . An action that referred to the seizure of the Guinean diplomatic legation ten years earlier, in protest against the Macías regime. The struggle of many parents - some linked to Falange or Fuerza Nueva - for independence and against the dictatorship, first in their country and then in exile, had become outdated. When their children took over and went into action, the enemies were at home: the neo-Nazis, sometimes integrated or protected by members of the state security forces. In fact, the murderer of Lucrecia Pérez in 1992 was a civil guard.
To confront them, they recruited members of the most powerful gangs and brotherhoods: Radical Black Power, Simplemente Hermanos, the Colours, MAN, West Side, the BRA - founded by Fermín Nvo, known as T-7 and considered by the Black Panthers to be the godfather of hip hop -, the Black Stones, Public Enemy Fan Club, Boricua, FTP and the Madrid Vandals , who were joined by some anti-racist skinheads. "We had to organise ourselves militarily so that they wouldn't smash our heads in," explains Abuy Nfubea, who recalls the neo-Nazi attack suffered in a restaurant in Móstoles by Africans celebrating Cameroon's victory over Argentina in the 1990 World Cup in Italy.
"In principle principle, the Spanish section of the Black Panther Party was not created to take revenge on the Nazis , but because Spain was diluting blacks in the Hispanic world, denying them," clarifies the journalist and writer.
However, in 1995, on the occasion of the second state congress, the newspaper El Mundo headlined: The Black Panthers organize to fight against the Nazi skinhead phenomenon .
Violence from the extreme right was a constant at the beginning of the decade, as reflected in another news item published in 1993: Two nazi skinheads end up stabbed after starting a fight against three blacks .
Four neo-Nazis had boarded a commuter train heading from Atocha to Fuenlabrada and shouted: "We are going to kill the blacks." The injured denied it, but El País made it clear that the police version confirmed the initial insults uttered by the skinheads , one of them a soldier.
Events like this had motivated, three years earlier, the Black Panther movement to advocate "the creation of an immediate secret strategy of self-defense against Nazi skinhead terrorism," while some neighborhoods of Alcalá de Henares had graffiti on their walls: "Black Panthers: by any means necessary."
"Young people were attacked by the bouncers at the discotheques and by the Nazis, who intimidated the boys and girls. Then, after the incident on the commuter train, black people began to patrol the trains and confront them," recalls Abuy Nfubea. And, conversely, was there a hunt for Nazis? "Of course, there was a context of confrontation. That was the situation," admits the founder of the Organised Front of African Youth ( FOJA ). "However, racist violence went unpunished, while activists suffered not only reprisals from the State, but also from Free Mandela, who called Marcelino Bondjale violent, expelled him and caused the movement to break up."
"We had a national vocation and we wanted to extend the Black Panther Party throughout the State. There were already people fighting in other places, but we provided them with an organic, political, ideological and philosophical base," says the author of the book Afrofeminism: 50 years of struggle and activism of black women in Spain (Ménades). Thus, they managed to expand from Madrid - and cities such as Móstoles, Torrejón, Fuenlabrada or Alcalá - to Barcelona, Valencia, Barcelona, Zaragoza and Bilbao, although they also reached towns such as Bembibre (El Bierzo) or Burela (Lugo), where the Cape Verdean community worked in the mines and in fishing.
Abuy Nfubea believes that the main legacy of the Black Panthers was the creation of the black community in Spain:
"It was a disciplined organisation whose objective was not only Nazi retaliation, but also political training and teaching about our history. We wanted to bring black people together, because Adolfo Suárez had carried out affirmative action policies, such as the decree on granting Spanish nationality to certain Guineans.
However, after the law on reparation and recognition of the black people, approved by a right-wing government, the PSOE created an equalising model," says the journalist and writer.
"That is to say, for the left, everyone is equal, there are no blacks or whites. But we were aware that this process was leading us to annihilation, so we were clear that we had to create a movement to defend our community," concludes Abuy Nfubea, who at the beginning of the century decided to re-establish the Black Panther Party, together with dozens of organisations in the Spanish State, in the Pan-Africanist movement. Its members were already too old to continue fighting in the streets, but they will continue to be present in the pages of a book he has written about the revolutionary vanguard of black youth.
Los Panteras Negras en España: así se gestó la vanguardia revolucionaria que combatió las agresiones nazis y racistas
Las palizas, el racismo y la conciencia política llevaron a varios jóvenes ecuatoguineanos a crear "una estrategia secreta de autodefensa" ante el auge de la ultraderecha en los noventa.www.publico.es
@Cannabrainer , when I reread this paragraph said by Abuy Nfubea,...
Abuy Nfubea - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre
Abuy Nfubea - Wikipedia
(...)"Latino and Hispanic are broad concepts - very broad and therefore lacking identifying value - that dangerously erase cultural heterogeneity on both continents at an international level, but also intra-national diversity." (...)
(...)"I claim the power of not allowing oneself to be named or defined by dominant groups that, to tell the truth, have neither the interest nor the capacity to understand the complexity of the processes of identity construction in multiethnic and multiracial countries, especially since the advent of the paradigms decolonial. There is an aspect in your gaze that does not observe that interest. In mine there is a more sociological and political one that highlights what Barth (Ethnic Groups and Boundaries) called the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion of ethnic groups that clashes head-on with the idea of meta-ethnicity as this dynamic can be understood by those that do not assume our multiplicity. This detail has no specific relationship with what you have raised, since by saying that "cultural identities add up, overlap, or intersect" there seems to be a clear understanding of the complexity of identity multiplicity. However, my approach would be to establish when they do not add up, do not overlap, or intersect, or when, despite this, there is a will of a group to establish dynamics of exclusion and inclusion on its own terms. Obviously, this does not sit well when a metropolis wants to build a common identity for political and economic interests."(...)
Simplifying to the maximum: The "Where the Sun Never Sets"...:
...versus "The 3 Races, and the Equality in the Law" :
...On the other hand, a certain sector of Communism on the "left" of the Communist Party of Spain (very Stalinist and Hoxhaist, in general, such as the Marxist-Leninist Party (Communist Reconstruction)), harshly criticize the current debates/agendas on racial issues. (as they also do with feminism or the diversity of sexual orientations/identities), assuming that these debates and problems do not exist in their ideology and would disappear instantly ("magically", perhaps Abuy Nfubea, would add?) with their policies, accusing capitalism and "revisionist left" to introduce these debates to pervert, dilute and separate the workers' struggle...
I see part of the reason in both positions...although I see that of the P.M.-L.(R.C.) as dangerously close to that of the ultra-right of VOX...
(I looked to illustrate the "imperial posture of where the Sun never sets" a imagen of "a black man from VOX" dressed as Don Pelayo or El Cid Campeador planting the white imperial flag with the red flaming cross in the middle of a camp of "non-Hispanic African" agrarian laborers ", those who pick strawberries, avocados or mangoes..but I couldn't find any, heh...; It would be funny):
versus :
...thank goodness we will always have black humor...or should we eradicate it?"
...Anyway, adopting a mixed style between Michel Ende and Augusto Monterroso: that is a debate that, without a doubt, perhaps deserves to be better debated in another better time...or maybe not...
...Have I already told you, cousin, the joke about the black man, the gypsy man and the cripple/disabled white "payo" man, who are having a party, with a white "merchero" man as the DJ,, while they try to "raised Spain"?...
Anyway...¡Salud, compañero!
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Eltitoguay
Well-known member
For all those on the right who still continue with the false mantra "Capitalism vs Marxism = Democracy vs Dictatorship", a brief approach to a nation that has become a "wet dream" of international capitalism like Equatorial Guinea, the so-called "North Korea of the capitalist world":
es.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
EQUATORIAL GUINEA
17 NOV 2018
Teodoro Obiang
GLOSSARY:
Francisco Macías Nguema —also known as Masié Nguema Biyogo— was the first president of independent Equatorial Guinea, a position he held between 1968 and 1979, the year in which he was overthrown by his nephew Teodoro Obiang. Despite having participated in the previous administration, Macías claimed to be a nationalist. He also said he admired Hitler and, while he lso sought certain ideological harmony within the context marked by the Cold War, and in a purely effectual gesture, his Single National Party (PUN) added an opportunistic T, for "workers", with which Macías, ignorant of the rudiments of the Marxism, tried to establish ties with Cuba and the USSR.
After being ousted from power, he was executed on 29 September 1979.
Public praise was instituted, poverty became suffocating, hospitals became death throes, the Public Administration ceased to exist and a great cloak of darkness covered everything, a silent chaos that was broken by the screams of those tortured in Blay Beach, that prison that became famous. These were the years, shortly after independence, when those convicted for having been declared subversives were subjected to the torture known as Ethiopian torture . This was suffered by those who had not managed to leave the country or those who had not died before from some painful story.
GLOSSARY:
The 'Ethiopian' torture consisted of tying two sticks to the victim's calf and squeezing the ends. It was one of a wide range of practices that included machetes, electric shocks or blows with red-hot iron bars. Political prisoners were sometimes forced to dance while being beaten. Before overthrowing his uncle, Teodoro Obiang Nguema held various positions during his regime, including that of warden of Blay Beach. The dictator, who will celebrate 40 years at the head of the country next year, has based his continuity on oil reserves, obtaining the complicity of foreign powers despite the embezzlement of fortunes and the perennial poverty of the population.
These were the years when rivers of sewage ran through the streets of the cities, when electricity was merely symbolic, when homes were a refuge for vermin. But the worst was the murderous fury of the owners of that power. Those abominable sanitary conditions gave rise to such a high mortality rate that one would say that Guinean lives were cut short by the jaws of death. Public health barely existed even to alleviate that disaster. That infamous life lasted eleven long years and, frankly, Guinea was on the verge of disappearing, despite the fact that there was no power or external force that threatened it, and despite the attention that Macías received from the countries of the communist bloc.
Fraga and Obiang
The former lieutenant colonel made timid efforts to maintain, at least formally, the separation of powers. But in a regime built around the satisfaction of the highest authority, the judiciary, the legislature and his own, the executive, rest shamelessly in the hands of the same person, who is, today, the longest-serving president in all of Africa.
GLOSSARY:
Before overthrowing his uncle, Teodoro Obiang Nguema held various posts during his regime, including that of warden of Blay Beach. The dictator, who will celebrate 40 years at the head of the country next year, has based his continuity on oil reserves, obtaining the complicity of foreign powers despite the embezzlement of fortunes and the perennial poverty of the population.
Almost five years after taking power, Obiang had already taken steps to keep him on a leash, and when the second term was approaching, the clamor about the need for a change in power was already international and general. What happened was that this political necessity was called “multipartyism” and democratic elections. Obiang had a hard time understanding this necessity, and he resorted to what he knew best to demonstrate his intransigence: murder, which resulted in the loss of a few more lives. The case of an alleged coup plotter who sought refuge in the Spanish embassy and was later handed over and imprisoned was notorious.
Civil Guard in Guinea
International pressure and public hopes might have borne some fruit, given that Obiang survived on international aid, but the discovery of oil and gas at the end of the 1990s dashed all hope, while revealing the hypocritical nature of the world powers, many of which were also colonial. Regarding the immense oil reserve, it must be said that there is an idea that has never been openly expressed that either Spain did not know how to discover it or did not want to reveal that it had discovered it. It was the Spaniard company CEPSA that was the first to carry out prospecting on that dormant wealth and that holds the secrets of those discoveries. Strengthened by the monetary power of oil, the Obiang regime almost made the frauds official with the aim of perpetuating itself in power, carried out cosmetic reforms to avoid pressure, but nothing has changed, because power has not changed hands.
GLOSSARY:
Equatorial Guinea is the sixth largest oil producer in Africa, with a production of 281,000 barrels per day in 2014, according to data from British Petroleum. It is also the country that depends most on this resource. But reserves are limited and the drop in the price of a barrel in recent years has resulted in an increase in poverty.
GLOSSARY:
In Equatorial Guinea, billions of euros are being diverted to foreign accounts in Obiang's circle. The most emblematic case is that of the president's son, known as Teodorín. Sentenced in France in October 2017 to three years in prison for money laundering and corruption, Teodorín has been vice president since 2016, on the way to succeeding his father.
Thus, while the Guinea of the powerful of the regime is the existence of sumptuous bank accounts abroad, in addition to movable and immovable property, a high percentage of Guineans have hardly any electricity, decent housing or schools that ensure a reasonable education for their children. Some remarkably private hospitals have been built, but the population does not have access to them and it is common to experience the theft of life in the jaws of death, as happened to me a few years ago. I was returning from my walks when I saw the wife of an uncle of mine with a child of almost a year and a half in her arms. He was still alive, but fainting. He was going somewhere in search of medical help, or financial help, or both. Then I became interested, and I ran home to secure the funds to meet the demands of those who would treat us in hospitals that might be better than those of Macías' time, but where they would only treat you if they knew you were going to pay. We went to the General Hospital of Malabo. We arrived and they put the child in a bed to offer him the care of his clearly failing health. But he did not survive. At the same time that they certified his death, and without any protocol, they offered him to us and, accompanied by his tearful mother, I carried him in my arms to cry in privacy. It was not possible for us to go by taxi because we could no longer hide the fact that that little Guinean was still alive.
As time passes inexorably, we hope that two things do not happen in Obiang's life: that he does not die soon, and that before his expected death he has placed someone from his blood family in the long-awaited seat of power...
JUN 18, 2019
With the feature film Guinea, the forbidden documentary , a team of Equatorial Guinean and Spanish filmmakers seeks to shed some light on the history of Equatorial Guinea fifty years after its independence as a Spanish colony.
“Fifty years ago, Equatorial Guinea was a province of Spain. Now, many people don’t even know where to find it on a map.” These two sentences begin the description of Guinea, the forbidden documentary , a feature film that seeks to shed some light on the opaque history of Equatorial Guinea when it has just celebrated half a century since its independence as a Spanish colony. A team of Spanish and Equatorial Guinean filmmakers is behind the first project on the Verkami crowdfunding platform that has allowed its promoters to remain anonymous “for security reasons.” Now that the first phase that will allow their work to go ahead has been completed, they agree to answer some questions for El Salto :
For the moment you have decided to remain anonymous. What are you exposing yourself to by leading this project?
We would like to take this opportunity to emphasise that it is not “an anonymous documentary” as has been said somewhere, nor will it be. We simply need to protect identities at this stage and once it is ready, part of the team will be present and another part will not. Unfortunately, it is a subject that cannot be worked on normally.
I assume that the history of Equatorial Guinea cannot be told in 70 minutes. What aspects have you focused on? What main objective would you say the documentary pursues?
We want the documentary to focus on the present, on the current situation in Guinea and its people, but at the same time to note the impact of history on our lives. We ask ourselves: why has apartheid in South Africa been talked about so often and we know nothing about the racist segregation that existed in Guinea during the Spanish colonisation? We understand that our job is simply to break the silence, to listen to the voice of those who know the most.
The information blackout on what is happening in Equatorial Guinea is total. Was it difficult to gather some information? How was that previous documentation phase?
Yes, the Obiang dictatorship has done the same as the previous dictatorships, exterminating journalism and the truth. In fact, there is not even reliable statistical data on such basic issues as the census of people living in the country. Lately, in the university environment there has been very powerful research and reflections that, unfortunately, have not managed to transcend the academic environment.
The Roig family (Mercadona), Miguel Ángel Moratinos, Francisco Hernando 'el Pocero' and Commissioner Villarejo are some of the names that appear in the trailer for the documentary. What was such a diverse group of Spaniards in Equatorial Guinea doing?
The opposition member Adolfo Obiang Bikó describes Equatorial Guinea as a family business with representatives in the United Nations. Equatorial Guinea is one of the few places in Africa where Spanish diplomacy has any relevance. Unfortunately, rather than democratising the country, some people have focused on business opportunities.
At 77, Teodoro Obiang has been in government for 40 years, making him the longest-serving leader on the continent. What are presidential elections like in Equatorial Guinea and why is the result always a seemingly overwhelming victory for the PDGE?
We are talking about a country without any kind of guarantees, where elections are held behind closed doors, without the media or electoral observers. There are people who will surely end up voting for Obiang out of fear, because they fear that their vote will somehow be revealed and there will be reprisals. As one opponent comments: “Not even God would have so much support in an election, how come he does?”
The discovery of large oil deposits in 1996 turned Equatorial Guinea almost overnight into one of the richest countries on the continent. Money from hydrocarbons has come to account for no less than 80% (in 2000) of the country's GDP. How has oil wealth affected the well-being of the population of a country that ranks 135th out of 188 countries in the Human Development Index?
Equatorial Guinea lives under an unbearable dictatorship that only benefits Obiang's immediate circle and large companies. This is one of the countries where inequality is most suffocating. Those closest to him party with Moët & Chandon, those who complain are sent to the army. The most shocking thing is to discover that many Guineans have become accustomed to living without freedom.
The latest Corruption Perception Index published by Transparency International places the country as one of the most corrupt (ranked 172 out of 180) in the public sector. To what extent is corruption structural among the ruling elites of Equatorial Guinea?
To the point that there are taxes that are paid directly into the bank accounts of ministers. It is one of the most crude and exaggerated forms of corruption that must exist. One of the most international writers in the country, Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel , describes the country as a “feudal regime”.
Devastating reports such as this latest one from Human Rights Watch have been documenting cases of systematic violation of Human Rights in the country for years. Some of the most recurrent ones denounce the imprisonment of political prisoners, arbitrary arrests and torture. Cases such as that of the cartoonist Ramón Esono are recent examples. How persecuted is freedom of expression in Equatorial Guinea ?
The situation is very extreme and, worst of all, there is no one to account for all the violence, arrests, torture, repression that exists... Obiang feels unpunished.
On what do they base their description of the country as “the African capitalist North Korea”?
Isolation, megalomania of its leaders, pre-eminence of the army, a single party, brutal persecution of dissidents, apparent religious freedom... Comparisons are always imprecise, but there are many points in common between the two countries, two of the most enigmatic totalitarian dictatorships in the world. The anniversary that Obiang celebrates every year is also very reminiscent of the cult of the North Korean leader. For weeks the media talks about the preparations, everyone is obliged to celebrate it, the television presenters congratulate him, smile and call him “your excellency”. It is delirious.
A seat on the United Nations Security Council, UNESCO prizes with his In fact , the international community is legitimising Obiang's regime and helping to clean up his image, as various organisations have denounced.
Absolutely. As Ramón Lobo wrote in 2012, thanks to oil, Obiang Nguema became a "presentable dictator". Of course, this is still happening today.
What would you say to those who oppose historical memory because it is about 'turning the page' and not 'stirring up the past'?
In recent days we have received many messages critical of our documentary, including some threats. What weighs most on us is that many of these comments show a lack of historical knowledge. One person told us that Spain has prospered in recent years and that if Equatorial Guinea has not, it is its fault. Comparing coloniser and colonised in this way is unusual.
Who and in what way reports on what happens on a daily basis in your country? Is there room in Equatorial Guinea for a local media outlet that is even minimally critical of the established power?
It is true that there is a very active diaspora, as are examples of the media Diario Rombe, Radio Macuto or associations such as Asodegue or EG Justice. But in the country the Internet is so expensive and so slow that it is not easy to breathe 'other air'. Social networks and certain websites are censored according to seasons and times. There are cracks and people who manage to say and do, but Obiang continues to impose his unique discourse with ease.
Every time Obiang gives an interview he leaves very serious headlines. In October 2018, speaking to TVE (Spanish Public Television) correspondent Luís Pérez, he declared that in Equatorial Guinea "there is practically no torture".
It is truly outrageous. Living in Equatorial Guinea is like reliving Francoism, but with a tropical climate.
They point to the Obiang regime, to those 'nostalgic for Francoism' and to the 'big media and the elites' as the three main actors not interested in their documentary coming to light. With this mix of detractors, it must not be easy to get such an ambitious work like this off the ground. Has any big media outlet or television channel been interested in the product you have in hand?
Not at the moment. In Spain we have found that there is no television channel that wants to co-produce, so we need popular support to make it possible. Pressures and difficulties with financing are always present when dealing with a subject like this. Look at what happened, for example, with 'Memoria Negra' , a documentary about Equatorial Guinea that TVE co-produced but did not want to broadcast and that the Guinean government did not authorise to be filmed in the country. The team from “Palmeras en la nieve” (Palmeras in the Snow), a film that was released in 2015 with a budget of 10 million euros, was also unable to film in Guinea. We don’t even have enough money for what they spent on catering.
In just 11 days they have managed to raise the 5,000 euros for the first phase. It seems that through the micro-funding route the reception has been very good.
We are very grateful. There are many people who have felt called upon and have mobilized. We need the maximum support to give it the strength it deserves and not fall by the wayside. And that path involves investing money. Without going any further, each fragment of the NO-DO that we would like to include costs about 2,500 euros per minute.
In this second phase of financing they are looking to double the research time and finance the translation and subtitles that allow each person to speak in their mother tongue (Bubi, Pichi, Annobonense Creole, Fang…). How will you make the project grow from now on?
We have more things in mind. Creating a website with extra videos, an educational suitcase for schools, enabling entities to schedule a showing in their spaces... At this time, any contribution will be of great help. Hopefully, with the campaign, a miracle will happen to us, like the people who did with “El silencio de otros” (The Silence of Others), who received great support and ended up being broadcast on public television with great audience success.
Thank you for your attention and good luck with the project.
Human rights activist Anacleto Micha Ndong Nlang initially faced the same charges over the same event, even though he was arrested four days before the others (when he visited the office to see whether party supporters under siege needed assistance). His charges were subsequently changed to “contempt against authority” and his case sent to ordinary court. On 19 May, he was sentenced to six months in prison and fined XAF 100,000 (around EUR 152). He was released on 23 June, some nine months after his arrest.
The death of Julio Obama occurred less than two weeks after Spain’s High Court opened an investigation against Carmelo Ovono Obiang, the son of the Equatorial Guinean president, and two other officials. They were accused of the alleged abduction and torture of four Equatorial Guinean nationals, including Julio Obama and another dual national as well as two other residents of Spain, all of whom were MLGE3R members.
On 16 February, the European Parliament adopted a resolution condemning “political persecution and repression of political opponents” in Equatorial Guinea, as well as the death of Julio Obama while in custody, and requesting an independent international investigation. In March, all three officials failed to appear at the Spanish High Court. The court ordered that Julio Obama’s body be taken back to Spain, but this was ignored. In April, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Equatorial Guinea informed the Spanish government that it had opened an investigation into the alleged torture of the four men, thereby claiming jurisdiction over the matter. Court proceedings in Spain were still pending at the end of the year.
www.amnesty.org
Guinea Ecuatorial - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre
Equatorial Guinea - Wikipedia
EQUATORIAL GUINEA
LIFE IN THE JAWS OF DEATH :
The author, an Equatorial Guinean writer, makes a historical review of the 50 years of independence of Equatorial Guinea, through the regimes of Macías and Obiang.17 NOV 2018
Teodoro Obiang
1. Innocent childhood
When we were growing up, we were told that among the peoples of Equatorial Guinea there were some people who liked the flesh of others. And when we learned to read and learned that the whites had been among us, we learned that they also left written records that when they set foot on our lands, someone told them to be careful, that a certain people who waited in the thick of the forest had the odious custom of wishing death on people who had desirable flesh. Since that stuck in our minds, we wanted to begin this brief reminder like that.2. Everything fell apart
But very soon that innocence was shattered and we opened our eyes to the terrifying presence of a former 'emancipated' [the emancipated constituted the black population assimilated to the whites] whom historical events brought to the presidency of the country after five years of merely formal autonomy. That man, Francisco Macías Nguema, soon renounced his collaborationist past and sought his African roots, a personal change that he imposed by means of slaps, beatings and death throughout Equatorial Guinea. It was then that we discovered, through his henchmen and the immense court of flatterers, that we had lived through 200 years of slavery and pillage and that we were redeemed thanks to the wise guidance of the only miracle of Equatorial Guinea, a great master of traditional art and culture, the honourable and great comrade Masié Nguema Biyogo Ñengue Ndong.GLOSSARY:
Francisco Macías Nguema —also known as Masié Nguema Biyogo— was the first president of independent Equatorial Guinea, a position he held between 1968 and 1979, the year in which he was overthrown by his nephew Teodoro Obiang. Despite having participated in the previous administration, Macías claimed to be a nationalist. He also said he admired Hitler and, while he lso sought certain ideological harmony within the context marked by the Cold War, and in a purely effectual gesture, his Single National Party (PUN) added an opportunistic T, for "workers", with which Macías, ignorant of the rudiments of the Marxism, tried to establish ties with Cuba and the USSR.
After being ousted from power, he was executed on 29 September 1979.
Public praise was instituted, poverty became suffocating, hospitals became death throes, the Public Administration ceased to exist and a great cloak of darkness covered everything, a silent chaos that was broken by the screams of those tortured in Blay Beach, that prison that became famous. These were the years, shortly after independence, when those convicted for having been declared subversives were subjected to the torture known as Ethiopian torture . This was suffered by those who had not managed to leave the country or those who had not died before from some painful story.
GLOSSARY:
The 'Ethiopian' torture consisted of tying two sticks to the victim's calf and squeezing the ends. It was one of a wide range of practices that included machetes, electric shocks or blows with red-hot iron bars. Political prisoners were sometimes forced to dance while being beaten. Before overthrowing his uncle, Teodoro Obiang Nguema held various positions during his regime, including that of warden of Blay Beach. The dictator, who will celebrate 40 years at the head of the country next year, has based his continuity on oil reserves, obtaining the complicity of foreign powers despite the embezzlement of fortunes and the perennial poverty of the population.
These were the years when rivers of sewage ran through the streets of the cities, when electricity was merely symbolic, when homes were a refuge for vermin. But the worst was the murderous fury of the owners of that power. Those abominable sanitary conditions gave rise to such a high mortality rate that one would say that Guinean lives were cut short by the jaws of death. Public health barely existed even to alleviate that disaster. That infamous life lasted eleven long years and, frankly, Guinea was on the verge of disappearing, despite the fact that there was no power or external force that threatened it, and despite the attention that Macías received from the countries of the communist bloc.
3. The “freedom coup”
In August 1979, the highest-ranking officer of that army of criminals staged a coup d'état and the Guineans had a respite. These were the beginnings of the "regime." It was when the Guineans believed that what had come before had been a nightmare, because it seemed incredible that that devourer of human flesh, as was later said of Macías, had been someone born on Guinean soil. Obiang had the task of restoring dignity to a people that barely knew each other, but he soon tasted the honey of power. Being a man of his extraction, and with the baggage accumulated in that regime of abuses and savagery, he inaugurated, based on electoral pantomimes and the use of intimidation, murder and fraud, what already historically bears his personal seal: the Obiang regimen.Fraga and Obiang
The former lieutenant colonel made timid efforts to maintain, at least formally, the separation of powers. But in a regime built around the satisfaction of the highest authority, the judiciary, the legislature and his own, the executive, rest shamelessly in the hands of the same person, who is, today, the longest-serving president in all of Africa.
GLOSSARY:
Before overthrowing his uncle, Teodoro Obiang Nguema held various posts during his regime, including that of warden of Blay Beach. The dictator, who will celebrate 40 years at the head of the country next year, has based his continuity on oil reserves, obtaining the complicity of foreign powers despite the embezzlement of fortunes and the perennial poverty of the population.
Almost five years after taking power, Obiang had already taken steps to keep him on a leash, and when the second term was approaching, the clamor about the need for a change in power was already international and general. What happened was that this political necessity was called “multipartyism” and democratic elections. Obiang had a hard time understanding this necessity, and he resorted to what he knew best to demonstrate his intransigence: murder, which resulted in the loss of a few more lives. The case of an alleged coup plotter who sought refuge in the Spanish embassy and was later handed over and imprisoned was notorious.
Civil Guard in Guinea
International pressure and public hopes might have borne some fruit, given that Obiang survived on international aid, but the discovery of oil and gas at the end of the 1990s dashed all hope, while revealing the hypocritical nature of the world powers, many of which were also colonial. Regarding the immense oil reserve, it must be said that there is an idea that has never been openly expressed that either Spain did not know how to discover it or did not want to reveal that it had discovered it. It was the Spaniard company CEPSA that was the first to carry out prospecting on that dormant wealth and that holds the secrets of those discoveries. Strengthened by the monetary power of oil, the Obiang regime almost made the frauds official with the aim of perpetuating itself in power, carried out cosmetic reforms to avoid pressure, but nothing has changed, because power has not changed hands.
GLOSSARY:
Equatorial Guinea is the sixth largest oil producer in Africa, with a production of 281,000 barrels per day in 2014, according to data from British Petroleum. It is also the country that depends most on this resource. But reserves are limited and the drop in the price of a barrel in recent years has resulted in an increase in poverty.
4. A gruesome present dominated by corruption
Today in Guinea we can talk about the need for education, there is even talk of a multi-party system, but the situation has not improved, except for the appearance and consolidation of an element that did not seem relevant in the previous regime: corruption. Coupled with nepotism and cronyism, corruption has allowed the regime to overcome the challenge of alternating power and the former henchmen to amass a not inconsiderable fortune, but subject to the possible ups and downs of a deeply unequal society, in which certain efforts have been made in certain infrastructures, and in civil constructions, although one should not forget the relationship they have with the increase in corruption. It would seem, therefore, that much of the money invested in some pharaonic works that contrast with the prevailing poverty has to do with the commissions demanded and received.GLOSSARY:
In Equatorial Guinea, billions of euros are being diverted to foreign accounts in Obiang's circle. The most emblematic case is that of the president's son, known as Teodorín. Sentenced in France in October 2017 to three years in prison for money laundering and corruption, Teodorín has been vice president since 2016, on the way to succeeding his father.
Thus, while the Guinea of the powerful of the regime is the existence of sumptuous bank accounts abroad, in addition to movable and immovable property, a high percentage of Guineans have hardly any electricity, decent housing or schools that ensure a reasonable education for their children. Some remarkably private hospitals have been built, but the population does not have access to them and it is common to experience the theft of life in the jaws of death, as happened to me a few years ago. I was returning from my walks when I saw the wife of an uncle of mine with a child of almost a year and a half in her arms. He was still alive, but fainting. He was going somewhere in search of medical help, or financial help, or both. Then I became interested, and I ran home to secure the funds to meet the demands of those who would treat us in hospitals that might be better than those of Macías' time, but where they would only treat you if they knew you were going to pay. We went to the General Hospital of Malabo. We arrived and they put the child in a bed to offer him the care of his clearly failing health. But he did not survive. At the same time that they certified his death, and without any protocol, they offered him to us and, accompanied by his tearful mother, I carried him in my arms to cry in privacy. It was not possible for us to go by taxi because we could no longer hide the fact that that little Guinean was still alive.
As time passes inexorably, we hope that two things do not happen in Obiang's life: that he does not die soon, and that before his expected death he has placed someone from his blood family in the long-awaited seat of power...
Guinea, the banned documentary: “Living in Equatorial Guinea is like reliving Francoism, but with a tropical climate” :
By Guillermo NayaJUN 18, 2019
With the feature film Guinea, the forbidden documentary , a team of Equatorial Guinean and Spanish filmmakers seeks to shed some light on the history of Equatorial Guinea fifty years after its independence as a Spanish colony.
“Fifty years ago, Equatorial Guinea was a province of Spain. Now, many people don’t even know where to find it on a map.” These two sentences begin the description of Guinea, the forbidden documentary , a feature film that seeks to shed some light on the opaque history of Equatorial Guinea when it has just celebrated half a century since its independence as a Spanish colony. A team of Spanish and Equatorial Guinean filmmakers is behind the first project on the Verkami crowdfunding platform that has allowed its promoters to remain anonymous “for security reasons.” Now that the first phase that will allow their work to go ahead has been completed, they agree to answer some questions for El Salto :
For the moment you have decided to remain anonymous. What are you exposing yourself to by leading this project?
We would like to take this opportunity to emphasise that it is not “an anonymous documentary” as has been said somewhere, nor will it be. We simply need to protect identities at this stage and once it is ready, part of the team will be present and another part will not. Unfortunately, it is a subject that cannot be worked on normally.
I assume that the history of Equatorial Guinea cannot be told in 70 minutes. What aspects have you focused on? What main objective would you say the documentary pursues?
We want the documentary to focus on the present, on the current situation in Guinea and its people, but at the same time to note the impact of history on our lives. We ask ourselves: why has apartheid in South Africa been talked about so often and we know nothing about the racist segregation that existed in Guinea during the Spanish colonisation? We understand that our job is simply to break the silence, to listen to the voice of those who know the most.
The information blackout on what is happening in Equatorial Guinea is total. Was it difficult to gather some information? How was that previous documentation phase?
Yes, the Obiang dictatorship has done the same as the previous dictatorships, exterminating journalism and the truth. In fact, there is not even reliable statistical data on such basic issues as the census of people living in the country. Lately, in the university environment there has been very powerful research and reflections that, unfortunately, have not managed to transcend the academic environment.
The Roig family (Mercadona), Miguel Ángel Moratinos, Francisco Hernando 'el Pocero' and Commissioner Villarejo are some of the names that appear in the trailer for the documentary. What was such a diverse group of Spaniards in Equatorial Guinea doing?
The opposition member Adolfo Obiang Bikó describes Equatorial Guinea as a family business with representatives in the United Nations. Equatorial Guinea is one of the few places in Africa where Spanish diplomacy has any relevance. Unfortunately, rather than democratising the country, some people have focused on business opportunities.
At 77, Teodoro Obiang has been in government for 40 years, making him the longest-serving leader on the continent. What are presidential elections like in Equatorial Guinea and why is the result always a seemingly overwhelming victory for the PDGE?
We are talking about a country without any kind of guarantees, where elections are held behind closed doors, without the media or electoral observers. There are people who will surely end up voting for Obiang out of fear, because they fear that their vote will somehow be revealed and there will be reprisals. As one opponent comments: “Not even God would have so much support in an election, how come he does?”
The discovery of large oil deposits in 1996 turned Equatorial Guinea almost overnight into one of the richest countries on the continent. Money from hydrocarbons has come to account for no less than 80% (in 2000) of the country's GDP. How has oil wealth affected the well-being of the population of a country that ranks 135th out of 188 countries in the Human Development Index?
Equatorial Guinea lives under an unbearable dictatorship that only benefits Obiang's immediate circle and large companies. This is one of the countries where inequality is most suffocating. Those closest to him party with Moët & Chandon, those who complain are sent to the army. The most shocking thing is to discover that many Guineans have become accustomed to living without freedom.
The latest Corruption Perception Index published by Transparency International places the country as one of the most corrupt (ranked 172 out of 180) in the public sector. To what extent is corruption structural among the ruling elites of Equatorial Guinea?
To the point that there are taxes that are paid directly into the bank accounts of ministers. It is one of the most crude and exaggerated forms of corruption that must exist. One of the most international writers in the country, Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel , describes the country as a “feudal regime”.
Devastating reports such as this latest one from Human Rights Watch have been documenting cases of systematic violation of Human Rights in the country for years. Some of the most recurrent ones denounce the imprisonment of political prisoners, arbitrary arrests and torture. Cases such as that of the cartoonist Ramón Esono are recent examples. How persecuted is freedom of expression in Equatorial Guinea ?
The situation is very extreme and, worst of all, there is no one to account for all the violence, arrests, torture, repression that exists... Obiang feels unpunished.
On what do they base their description of the country as “the African capitalist North Korea”?
Isolation, megalomania of its leaders, pre-eminence of the army, a single party, brutal persecution of dissidents, apparent religious freedom... Comparisons are always imprecise, but there are many points in common between the two countries, two of the most enigmatic totalitarian dictatorships in the world. The anniversary that Obiang celebrates every year is also very reminiscent of the cult of the North Korean leader. For weeks the media talks about the preparations, everyone is obliged to celebrate it, the television presenters congratulate him, smile and call him “your excellency”. It is delirious.
A seat on the United Nations Security Council, UNESCO prizes with his In fact , the international community is legitimising Obiang's regime and helping to clean up his image, as various organisations have denounced.
Absolutely. As Ramón Lobo wrote in 2012, thanks to oil, Obiang Nguema became a "presentable dictator". Of course, this is still happening today.
What would you say to those who oppose historical memory because it is about 'turning the page' and not 'stirring up the past'?
In recent days we have received many messages critical of our documentary, including some threats. What weighs most on us is that many of these comments show a lack of historical knowledge. One person told us that Spain has prospered in recent years and that if Equatorial Guinea has not, it is its fault. Comparing coloniser and colonised in this way is unusual.
Who and in what way reports on what happens on a daily basis in your country? Is there room in Equatorial Guinea for a local media outlet that is even minimally critical of the established power?
It is true that there is a very active diaspora, as are examples of the media Diario Rombe, Radio Macuto or associations such as Asodegue or EG Justice. But in the country the Internet is so expensive and so slow that it is not easy to breathe 'other air'. Social networks and certain websites are censored according to seasons and times. There are cracks and people who manage to say and do, but Obiang continues to impose his unique discourse with ease.
Every time Obiang gives an interview he leaves very serious headlines. In October 2018, speaking to TVE (Spanish Public Television) correspondent Luís Pérez, he declared that in Equatorial Guinea "there is practically no torture".
It is truly outrageous. Living in Equatorial Guinea is like reliving Francoism, but with a tropical climate.
They point to the Obiang regime, to those 'nostalgic for Francoism' and to the 'big media and the elites' as the three main actors not interested in their documentary coming to light. With this mix of detractors, it must not be easy to get such an ambitious work like this off the ground. Has any big media outlet or television channel been interested in the product you have in hand?
Not at the moment. In Spain we have found that there is no television channel that wants to co-produce, so we need popular support to make it possible. Pressures and difficulties with financing are always present when dealing with a subject like this. Look at what happened, for example, with 'Memoria Negra' , a documentary about Equatorial Guinea that TVE co-produced but did not want to broadcast and that the Guinean government did not authorise to be filmed in the country. The team from “Palmeras en la nieve” (Palmeras in the Snow), a film that was released in 2015 with a budget of 10 million euros, was also unable to film in Guinea. We don’t even have enough money for what they spent on catering.
In just 11 days they have managed to raise the 5,000 euros for the first phase. It seems that through the micro-funding route the reception has been very good.
We are very grateful. There are many people who have felt called upon and have mobilized. We need the maximum support to give it the strength it deserves and not fall by the wayside. And that path involves investing money. Without going any further, each fragment of the NO-DO that we would like to include costs about 2,500 euros per minute.
In this second phase of financing they are looking to double the research time and finance the translation and subtitles that allow each person to speak in their mother tongue (Bubi, Pichi, Annobonense Creole, Fang…). How will you make the project grow from now on?
We have more things in mind. Creating a website with extra videos, an educational suitcase for schools, enabling entities to schedule a showing in their spaces... At this time, any contribution will be of great help. Hopefully, with the campaign, a miracle will happen to us, like the people who did with “El silencio de otros” (The Silence of Others), who received great support and ended up being broadcast on public television with great audience success.
Thank you for your attention and good luck with the project.
Human rights activist Anacleto Micha Ndong Nlang initially faced the same charges over the same event, even though he was arrested four days before the others (when he visited the office to see whether party supporters under siege needed assistance). His charges were subsequently changed to “contempt against authority” and his case sent to ordinary court. On 19 May, he was sentenced to six months in prison and fined XAF 100,000 (around EUR 152). He was released on 23 June, some nine months after his arrest.
Torture and other ill-treatment
In January, the Spain-based opposition group Movement for the Liberation of the Third Equatorial Guinea (MLGE3R) announced the death in detention of one of its leading activists, Julio Obama Mefuman, a dual Spanish and Equatorial Guinean citizen, and accused the authorities of torturing him multiple times. He had been serving a 60-year prison sentence in Oveng Azem prison on charges of participating in an alleged attempted coup. Foreign minister Simeón Oyono Esono Angué confirmed that Julio Obama had died in a Mongomo hospital following illness but refuted the accusations of torture.The death of Julio Obama occurred less than two weeks after Spain’s High Court opened an investigation against Carmelo Ovono Obiang, the son of the Equatorial Guinean president, and two other officials. They were accused of the alleged abduction and torture of four Equatorial Guinean nationals, including Julio Obama and another dual national as well as two other residents of Spain, all of whom were MLGE3R members.
On 16 February, the European Parliament adopted a resolution condemning “political persecution and repression of political opponents” in Equatorial Guinea, as well as the death of Julio Obama while in custody, and requesting an independent international investigation. In March, all three officials failed to appear at the Spanish High Court. The court ordered that Julio Obama’s body be taken back to Spain, but this was ignored. In April, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Equatorial Guinea informed the Spanish government that it had opened an investigation into the alleged torture of the four men, thereby claiming jurisdiction over the matter. Court proceedings in Spain were still pending at the end of the year.
Arbitrary detention
Young men remained in arbitrary detention after the government’s “Cleaning Operation” against youth gang crime. In February, Pablo Santiago Nsue Ondo Angue, a 22-year-old man who was arrested under this scheme, died in Oveng Azem prison of cardiorespiratory arrest. He had remained in detention despite a court order granting him release in October 2022.LGBTI people’s rights
In May, the organization for LGBTI rights, We are Part of the World, published a report denouncing alleged torture of 12 LGBTI people by the authorities. On 10 July, the Malabo office of the organization was allegedly searched by security forces with no warrant.
Human rights in Equatorial Guinea
Stay up to date on the state of human rights in Equatorial Guinea with the latest research, campaigns and education material from Amnesty International.
www.amnesty.org
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a long read, i'd guess...
Eltitoguay
Well-known member
a long read, i'd guess...
PRAISE TO THE BREVITY
I often hear brevity praised, and I myself am temporarily happy when I hear it repeated that if good things are short, they are twice as good.However, in satire 1, I, Horace asks himself, or pretends to ask Maecenas, why no one is happy with his condition, and the merchant envies the soldier and the soldier the merchant. You remember, don't you?
The truth is that the writer of short stories yearns for nothing more in the world than to write endlessly long texts, long texts in which the imagination does not have to work, in which facts, things, animals and men cross paths, seek each other out or flee from each other, live, coexist, love each other or freely shed their blood without being subject to the semicolon, to the full stop.
To that full stop which at this moment has been imposed on me by something stronger than myself, which I respect and which I hate.
Augusto Monterroso
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what i read here, i agree with for the most part. it being historical fact (largely) makes that a simple decision. you have presented SO much that most will not wade all the way through it however true it is. the average person has an attention span somewhat shorter than a cat does. 
i WILL go back through when i have the time...
i WILL go back through when i have the time...Eltitoguay
Well-known member
what i read here, i agree with for the most part. it being historical fact (largely) makes that a simple decision. you have presented SO much that most will not wade all the way through it however true it is. the average person has an attention span somewhat shorter than a cat does.
Damn, but from time to time I post a photo, or even a music video... Kittens, the resource of kittens never fails...; I'm going to see if I can find a thread of videos of adorable and funny Marxist kittens meowing the International...
Eltitoguay
Well-known member
By the way, and for those who find it difficult to read "long" texts (and without drawings), I have found Hal Draper's writing "The 2 Souls of Socialism" in audio.Hal Draper (1914 -1990; Brooklyn, New York) is, for me, one of the Marxists of the United States. which has had the most importance for contemporary international (at least European) Marxism:
His Marxism is influenced by the Trotskyist current first, and the Shachtmanist current later.
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He turned to Marxismism during the Great Depression of the 1930s, joining the youth section of the Socialist Party of the USA, the Young Peoples Socialist League (YPSL). There he took part in the struggle against the right wing of the SP which controlled the leadership. In 1937 the YPSL decided to leave the SP, support the Fourth International, and join the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) of the USA.
Socialist Workers Party (United States) - Wikipedia
The YPSL membership elected Draper, who had been writing articles for the Trotskyist journal Socialist Appeal since 1935 , to the post of national secretary. Following severe internal discussions, the SWP adopted the position that the USSR was a degenerated workers' state which had to be defended against imperialism while continuing to advocate a political revolution against the Stalinist leadership. Draper, who had already begun to regard the USSR as neither a bourgeois nor a workers' state but rather a kind of bureaucratic collectivism, left the SWP in 1940, following the pact between Stalin's USSR and Nazi Germany and the Soviet invasions of Poland and Finland, to form the Workers Party . Draper died in 1990, still active in Marxist politics and theory.
For me, his importance lies in his emphasis on "socialism from below" vs. "socialism from above," which he considers as important as "Marxist democratic socialism" vs. "Single Party socialism."
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His most extensive work would be his four-volume study "Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution" (1977-1989);
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but its main arguments are summarized in the pamphlet "The Two Souls of Socialism" (1964), which due to its great interest I will reproduce in my next message.
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Hal Draper - Wikipedia
I reproduce again only its index and introduction to situate the possible listener, and I leave the complete pamphlet linked in audio:
Hal Draper : The two souls of socialism
Index:1. The two souls of socialism
2. Some socialist "precursors"
3. The first modern socialists
4. Marx's contribution
5. The myth of the "libertarian" character of anarchism
6. Lassalle and state socialism
7. The Fabian model
8. The "revisionist" facade
9. The 100% American (U.S.A.) scene
10. Six subtypes of socialism from above
11. Which side are you on?
"Throughout the history of socialist ideas and movements, the fundamental division is between socialism from above and socialism from below. What unites the very different forms of socialism from above is the conception that, in one form or another, socialism (or a reasonable facsimile of it) must be given as a handout to grateful masses by a ruling elite not in fact subject to their control. The heart of socialism from below is its claim that socialism can only be realised through the self-emancipation of active masses who, raising their hands to it, mobilise themselves 'from below' in the struggle to take charge of their own destiny, as actors (and not just subjects) on the historical scene."The current crisis of socialism is a crisis of the meaning of socialism.
For the first time in world history, quite possibly a majority of its inhabitants call themselves "socialists" in one sense or another; but there has never been a time when such a label was less informative.1 The closest thing to a common content in the various "socialisms" is a negation: anti-capitalism. On the positive side, the variety of incompatible and conflicting ideas that call themselves socialist is wider than the range of ideas within the bourgeois world.
Even anti-capitalism is becoming less and less a common factor. At one end of the spectrum, some social democratic parties have almost eliminated any specifically socialist claims from their programmes, promising to maintain private enterprise wherever this is possible. The most prominent example is German social democracy ("As an idea, a philosophy and a social movement, socialism in Germany has not, for a long time, been represented by a political party," sums up D. A. Chalmers in his recent book, The Social Democratic Party of Germany ). These parties have so redefined socialism that it no longer exists, but they have only formalised a tendency that is the same as that of all reformist social democracy. In what sense are all these parties still socialist?
On the other side of the world stage, there are the communist states, whose proclamation as socialist is based on a negation: the abolition of the capitalist private profit system, and on the fact that the ruling class is not made up of private owners. From a positive point of view, however, the socio-economic system that has replaced capitalism would not be recognizable to Karl Marx. The state owns the means of production, but who owns the state? Certainly not the masses of workers, who are exploited, unfree, and deprived of all political and social control. A new ruling class, the bureaucrats, dominates over a collectivist system: a bureaucratic collectivism. Unless stateization is mechanically equated with "socialism," in what sense are these societies "socialist"?
These two so-called socialisms are very different, but they have more in common than they realize. Social democracy has characteristically dreamed of "socializing" capitalism from above. Its basic principle has always been that increased state intervention in society and the economy is "in itself" socialist. This principle has a fatal family resemblance to the Stalinist conception of imposing, from above, something called socialism, and of equating statization with socialism. Both conceptions have their roots in the ambiguous history of the socialist idea.
Let us go back to the roots: the following pages aim to investigate the meaning of socialism historically, following a new path. There have always been different "types of socialism", which have been commonly divided into reformist or revolutionary, peaceful or violent, democratic or authoritarian, etc. These divisions exist, but the fundamental one is another. Throughout the history of socialist ideas and movements, the fundamental division is between socialism from above and socialism from below .
What unites the many different forms of socialism from above is the conception that socialism (or a reasonable facsimile of it) must be handed out as alms to the grateful masses, in one form or another, by a ruling elite who are not in fact subject to its control. The heart of socialism from below is its assertion that socialism can only be realised through the self-emancipation of the active masses in motion, coming to it, freely with their own hands, mobilised "from below" in a struggle to take charge of their own destiny, as actors (not simply as patient subjects) of this stage of history. "The emancipation of the workers must be the work of the workers themselves" - this is the first paragraph of the statutes written by Marx for the First International, and this is the first principle of his entire work.
It is the conception of socialism from above that explains the acceptance of communist dictatorship as a form of "socialism." It is the conception of socialism from above that concentrates all the attention of social democracy on the parliamentary superstructure of society and on the manipulation of "the top" of the economy, making it hostile to mass action from below. Socialism from above is the dominant tradition in the development of socialism.
Note that this is not a peculiarity of socialism. On the contrary, the longing for emancipation from above is the principle that runs throughout the centuries of class society and political oppression. It is the permanent promise given by every ruling power to keep the people looking up for protection, rather than looking inward for freedom from the need for protection. The people relied on kings to correct the injustices done by the lords, and on messiahs to destroy the tyranny of the kings. Instead of taking the bold path of mass action from below, it is always safer and wiser to find the "good" ruler who "can make the people happy." The pattern of emancipation from above is repeated throughout the history of civilization, and is also evident in socialism. But it is only within the framework of the modern socialist movement that liberation from below can become a realistic aspiration; within socialism, such an aspiration begins to emerge, but in fits and starts. The history of socialism can be read as a continuous but repeatedly failed effort to free itself from the old tradition, the tradition of emancipation from above.
Convinced that the current crisis of socialism can only be understood in terms of this great division within the socialist tradition, we will move on to some examples of the two souls of socialism. (...)
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Eltitoguay
Well-known member
Supplement on the ideas of the IST:
Spanish | Catalan
International Socialist Tendency - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre
International Socialist Tendency - Wikipedia
ABOUT THE INTERNATIONAL SOCIALIST CURRENT :
The International Socialist Tendency (IST) is a network of revolutionary socialist organisations committed to the idea of working-class self-emancipation, and to the development and extension of the classical Marxist tradition pioneered by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky and others. Today, groups linked to the IST are active in some 20 countries around the world, and we have sympathisers in many other countries.Our origins
Historically, the largest organisation in the IST was the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in Britain. This began as the Socialist Review Group (1950-1962), then became the International Socialists (1962-1977), before changing its name to the SWP in 1977.
Socialist Workers Party (UK) - Wikipedia
Cliff, by contrast, characterized the USSR after the Stalinist counterrevolution as a particular variant of capitalism, with exploitation of the working class and capitalist accumulation enforced by inter-imperialist rivalry between states on a global level. This analysis led to the slogan, used by the group during the Cold War: “Neither Washington nor Moscow, but international socialism.”
Cliff attracted around him a number of talented activists and theorists, such as Mike Kidron, Duncan Hallas and Chris Harman, and eventually co-thinkers in other countries, who helped develop this analysis, creating a distinctive strain of Marxism that was critical of both Western “free market” capitalism and Stalinist state capitalism.
Cliff's theory of state capitalism had implications not only for the analysis of the Soviet Union. It meant rejecting the idea that capitalism could be overcome or workers' states created through processes of change from above, as was the case with the creation of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe under the domination of the USSR after the Second World War. This was one element in an attempt to revitalise a tradition that another dissident Trotskyist, Hal Draper, called "socialism from below". It involved re-establishing the principle that only the working class was capable of acting as the agent of social revolution essential to creating a truly socialist society.
Cliff and in particular Kidron also developed an important analysis of the nature of the boom that Western capitalism experienced in the decades following the Second World War. This argued that wasteful spending, especially spending on arms, had checked some of the crisis tendencies of capitalism, allowing it to enjoy a sustained period of expansion and even allowing improvements in the living standards of many working people in countries such as Britain.
However, the analysis also argued that the drive toward crisis inherent in capitalism would eventually reassert itself. This allowed the group Cliff and Kidron were building to reject both the apocalyptic predictions of imminent capitalist collapse circulating among many Trotskyist groups and the idea, popular among left reformists, that capitalism had completely overcome its tendency toward crisis.
Initially, the group worked within youth organisations connected with the Labour Party and movements such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament to expand its membership. In 1960 it was a discussion group of about 60 people. By 1967 it was a group of perhaps 400 activists, mostly students and young people, but including some trade union activists. The initial hard work to expand membership paid off in 1968, a year marked by student riots, the black rebellion in the US, the anti-Vietnam War movement, the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia and, in May, the largest general strike in history in France.
The group now had enough members to try to relate to the explosion of struggles that year, not only by recruiting students but also by using its new weekly paper, Socialist Worker , to build an audience among workers. By the end of the year, the organization had become a small revolutionary party of about a thousand militants, with a stronger internal structure that allowed it to intervene more effectively in the struggles that were developing.
As the organisation grew, it began to form links with other revolutionary groups in other parts of the world with a similar focus and outlook. The leaderships of these groups began to meet, usually around the SWP’s summer “Marxism” days in London, and the network eventually became known as the International Socialist Tendency (IST). As well as sharing and seeking to develop the theoretical outlook pioneered by Cliff and others, each of these groups sought to develop a non-sectarian approach to forging a revolutionary socialist organisation on its own turf.
This approach involves:
- An understanding of the basic routine required to sustain and strengthen the organization based on the combination of political propaganda and debate, with the construction of broader movements and struggles, however modest their scope;
- A commitment to seize every opportunity that exists to connect and participate in the living struggle of the working class. This includes participation in unions and similar organizations in which workers gather;
- A commitment to internationalism and an unequivocal opposition to all forms of oppression;
- An attempt to work with broader forces within the working class, building what Trotsky called “united fronts,” while maintaining the independence of the revolutionary left, including its ability to present revolutionary arguments and propose its own tactics for the resulting movements;
- An insistence on the need to create mass revolutionary parties within the working class, based on its most conscious elements, which are capable of intervening in broader struggles and, in revolutionary situations, giving leadership to this class in a confrontation with the capitalist state.
The IST does not claim to be a new “International” in the sense of the First, Second or Third International in which Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky participated.
The first two Internationals involved mass organisations: between them they had millions of members.
The degeneration of the Second International towards reformism became clear when many of its component parties supported their own ruling classes during the First World War.
This led Lenin and Trotsky to launch the Third International, known as the Comintern. They did so in the wake of the Russian Revolution of 1917, the first successful proletarian revolution to take power at a national level. As a result, this International also managed to attract mass organisations.
Trotsky’s Fourth International, by contrast, was born out of a moment of defeat. It reflected the degeneration of the Third International under its Stalinist leadership and the catastrophe of the Nazi victory in Germany.
Unfortunately, the forces at Trotsky’s disposal when the Fourth International was founded in 1938 were minuscule compared with those of the earlier Internationals.
Moreover, its political orientation was based on Trotsky’s perspective, in the run-up to World War II, that the postwar world would witness a deep and prolonged economic crisis that would erode the influence of reformism; that Stalinism would be an unstable phenomenon; and that World War II, like World War I, would end amid revolutions.
In reality, the postwar world saw the beginning of a sustained boom in capitalism and the extension of Soviet power in Eastern Europe. Stalinism and social democracy grew stronger. The convulsions that accompanied the end of the war were contained. The forces of the Fourth International remained minuscule. Not only did they tend to cling to Trotsky's prewar analysis, they were also relatively isolated from the mass workers' struggles that are necessary to drive the growth and political revitalization of a revolutionary socialist organization.
Since the Second World War, the Fourth International has fractured and divided many times, around various ideological and organizational disputes, with a variety of groups claiming the mantle of the International or seeking to establish a “Fifth International.”
The IST does not claim any self-granted right to lead the masses to the overthrow of capitalism. Such a right must be earned through political practice. It does not call itself a “world party of revolution” based on democratic centralism. Today, no revolutionary group anywhere possesses the authority that comes with having led a successful socialist revolution. We are rather a network of revolutionary groups with a common theoretical approach and a shared history, both based on the class struggle in our respective countries.
While we may share initiatives, ideas, advice, etc., each of our member parties has its own leadership and applies tactics appropriate to its own situation. Each group aspires to create mass revolutionary parties in its own country, but we understand that at any given time the state of the class struggle and the set of political forces existing in each society may generate differences in organizational approach.
Some groups within the IST can function as small revolutionary organisations, seeking to develop a variety of political initiatives and lead workers' struggles in a variety of terrains. Some are, as yet, relatively small groups that are still developing their capacity to intervene successfully at a national level. Others act as independent revolutionary currents within broader left organisations, with a view to developing the influence of our ideas and ultimately creating mass revolutionary parties.
Whatever the context, these groups seek to demonstrate their relevance to the working class in their respective country by providing leadership in class-based political and economic struggles, and by developing and revitalizing Marxist theory that can guide and inform these struggles.
A new International is desirable, but it can only be created through a large-scale revolutionary struggle. Out of this struggle will emerge important parties, rooted in the working class and capable of challenging the capitalist state, and with the authority to lead such a movement.
However, IST groups have undertaken a number of coordinated initiatives. This began with the emergence of a new anti-capitalist movement contesting neoliberal globalisation following the Seattle protests of November 1999. We worked together, for example, to promote the development of the European Social Forum, notably at its first meeting in Florence in November 2002, which acted as a launching pad for the world day of protest against the invasion of Iraq on 15 February 2003.
The SWP had already been one of the driving forces in launching the Stop the War Coalition (the massive anti-war coalition in Britain) following the 9/11 attacks. Together with its sister organisations elsewhere, it worked with other left forces both to build the anti-war movement in their own countries and to promote joint international initiatives.
In recent years we have drawn on this to work together to build mass united fronts to combat the rise of racism and fascism, and to promote solidarity with migrants and refugees.
This work draws on the experience of the Anti Nazi League in Britain from the 1970s onwards, alongside the more recent work of KEERFA in Greece, Unite Against Fascism and Stand Up To Racism in Britain, or Unitat Contra el Feixisme i el Racisme in Catalunya-Spain, …, which have all been able to confront the threat of rising far-right groups.
The composition of the IST
There are currently IST affiliated groups in a number of countries including Aotearoa/New Zealand, Australia, Austria, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Ghana, Greece, Ireland, Netherlands, Nigeria, Pakistan, Poland, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Thailand, Turkey, the USA and Zimbabwe; we also have affiliated groups in wider organisations such as the New Anti-Capitalist Party in France and the Left Party in Germany.In other countries we have smaller groups of affiliated organisations who share our perspective. A complete and up-to-date list of affiliated organisations is available on our website.
The IST group leaderships continue to meet once a year, usually in London in the summer. Between these meetings, representatives from a smaller number of groups, known as the “IST Coordination”, chosen to reflect the variety of experiences and geographical spread of the IST, meet electronically to discuss how best to coordinate our work and share our experiences.
Although most of our initiatives focus on our respective countries, the IST maintains a website, publishes statements and organizes occasional meetings, and we have coordinated our work on a wide variety of issues, particularly since the late 1990s, as described above.
Approaching the IST
Sometimes we are approached by organisations that want to work with the IST. We are happy about this. However, we know from experience that it is not enough to simply share a set of formal theoretical ideas. In order to collaborate effectively, we also have to develop an understanding of each other's political practice and general approach to the struggle for socialism.It is not just about the degree of agreement with our theoretical framework, we are also interested in what a group does to participate and develop the class struggle in its own country.
In general, cooperation over a period of time, sharing articles and speakers, discussions about shared struggles, etc., are important prerequisites for any application to join the IST.
We encourage other groups and individuals to translate our texts and publish them, share the statements we issue, etc., whether or not they are formally affiliated. If an organization applies to join the IST, this decision is made at our annual meeting.
What is the IST? : Notes from Spain on the International Socialist Current
The International Socialist Tendency, better known by its acronym IST (International Socialist Tendency) and of which Marx21 is a part, has existed in the Spanish State for almost 30 years.
Even so, many aspects of the politics and actions of the movement and the groups that comprise it are ignored or poorly understood.
The crisis of reformist organizations and the absence of debates on the part of the revolutionary left do not invalidate the need to have a better understanding of the main revolutionary currents in order to see the common points and generate convergences. For this reason, in this text we deal with some aspects of the politics of our current.
The origins of our international movement
For decades, there have been a multitude of Trotskyist currents and groups, which are very divided among themselves and, in most cases, have little membership. To any outsider, this panorama of splits, sectarianism and apparently Byzantine disputes is unattractive, as well as incomprehensible. However, one cannot understand the current situation without understanding something of its history.The origins of the IST go back to the crisis of the Trotskyist movement in the early 1950s. At that time, a handful of militants in Britain established the Socialist Review Group, later renamed the International Socialists and today the Socialist Workers Party, the SWP.
In 1938 Trotsky and his followers established the Fourth International (FI). It was a desperate gesture in the face of a terrible situation: the rise of fascism, the domination of Stalinism over the communist movement, the defeat of the Spanish Revolution, a deep economic crisis, the imminence of world war and the almost total isolation of the revolutionary left.
The model for the International was the Third International which had been established after the Russian Revolution of 1917 and enjoyed the support of millions. Trotsky himself, after having declared himself in principle in favour of the founding of a new International in 1933, had initially opposed its establishment without real forces. However, by the end of the decade, the situation was so disastrous that Trotsky opted to launch the new International, believing that the International would soon overcome its weakness.
After the Second World War, it became clear that Trotsky's predictions had not been correct. He had predicted that after the war there would be another economic depression, even worse than that of 1929, but capitalism not only survived, but entered into the most important boom in its history.
Bourgeois democracy and reformism, far from disappearing, enjoyed a golden age in the industrialized countries. Trotsky had predicted the disappearance of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the USSR, as a fragile and unstable layer, but it not only survived, but was greatly strengthened, extending its domination to Eastern Europe and China. Meanwhile, the forces of the IC had grown very little and, in contrast, the communist parties emerged from the war stronger than ever.
Faced with this situation, the majority of the Trotskyist movement – now without Trotsky, who was assassinated by an agent of Stalin in 1940 – was unable to offer a minimally coherent explanation of the new situation. Above all, the creation of states with the same social and economic system as the USSR in a number of countries created a notable theoretical confusion within the Trotskyist ranks.
A necessary review
While most Trotskyists attempted to square the circle, denying that things were not as Trotsky had foreseen in 1938, a few people attempted to analyse the new situation from a Marxist perspective.Among them, Tony Cliff (one of the founders of our current) and his comrades came to the conclusion that the economic system of the USSR – and by extension of the other “communist” countries – was state capitalism. Cliff based his analysis on a careful reading of Marx, as well as on Trotsky’s own earlier analysis, but above all on a detailed study of the socio-economic reality of the USSR.
Key elements of this analysis were that state ownership in itself was not socialism, and that capitalism is defined (according to Marx) as a social relationship between social classes and the means of production. At the same time, the dynamic of the system was “accumulation for the sake of accumulation” – the driving force of capitalism that Marx identifies in Capital. Furthermore, the economic system of the USSR had entered into a dynamic of competition with other capitals. At the same time, Trotsky’s analysis of the nature of the Stalinist bureaucracy as an unstable layer helped to understand how it had become the ruling class.
The great advantage of the theory of state capitalism was that it allowed Marxism to be saved as a revolutionary theory. For Marx, “the emancipation of the working class is the act of the working class itself.” By transforming the world, people transform themselves. Without this process of “self-emancipation,” Marxism ceases to be a theory of human liberation and enters the realm of dogma, within which human beings are passive elements and not the “motor of history.”
This is how we understand the monstrosity that the Stalinist countries were, as a system of exploitation and repression so strong on the working class, in some cases more than in the “normal” capitalist countries. Without understanding this, socialism remains an abstraction, its democratic component being removed. Furthermore, if it were possible to end capitalism without the active participation of the workers – and this participation did not occur in Eastern Europe, invaded by the Russian army – the very centrality of Marxism would be called into question.
In parallel to the theory of state capitalism, Cliff and others developed an analysis of post-war capitalism which showed how spending on arms (the “permanent arms economy”) prevented the economy from falling back into crisis as it had after the First World War. Thus, the theory of the permanent arms economy enabled the precursors of the IST to explain the boom in capitalism after the Second World War. Cliff also made a critical revision of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, which was indispensable for understanding the new processes of national and social liberation in the so-called “third world”.
The IST
Although there were already pockets of supporters of the SWP's ideas in Germany, Denmark, Greece, Ireland, etc. in the 1970s, the basis for an international movement as such did not exist. The only organisation with any presence was what would become the International Socialist Organization (ISO) in the United States after 1977.The collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 opened up new perspectives for what the IST would become. Most radical left groups were at pains to explain the reasons for the collapse of “communism” without the working masses of these countries doing the slightest thing to defend “their” states. In this context, nuclei sympathetic to the ideas of the SWP grew during the 1990s and the IST as such emerged as a more defined current.
In the spring of 1994, the first newsletter of the movement was published in Spain. The newsletter bore the same name as the group that published it: International Socialism. In November 1997, the newsletter became a newspaper. From 2000, both the newspaper and the group were called En Lucha/En Lluita.
At first, it was inevitable that the current would be dominated by the British party, given its origins, but the growth of some of the IST's organisations has led to the creation of a coordinating body made up of the main groups.
IST has groups in 26 countries and some have gained a certain weight in the radical left, consolidating themselves through participation in the anti-capitalist and anti-war movement, and more recently in the united struggle against fascism and racism, but they have different ways of working.
In Ireland, the SWN (Socialist Workers Network) is a central part of People Before Profit, an anti-neoliberal coalition that has four seats in the Irish parliament and one in Northern Ireland.
In Scotland, SWP members participated in the Scottish Socialist Party, until its crisis and split in 2006.
IST supporters in France participate in Autonomie de Classe; part of its membership has been involved for years in the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste, but this organisation is now in crisis.
In Germany, the IST people worked as the Marx21 current within the reformist party Die Linke, but this party is also in a serious crisis, and our own group is in trouble, caused by excessive adaptation to its reformist environment.
In Denmark, Internationale Socialister has participated in the Red and Green Alliance and the Norwegian group, Internasjonale Sosialister, in Rodt.
In Greece, the IST, the SEK, is the most important organisation of the revolutionary left in the country and is part of the Antarysa coalition.
In Canada, the IST organisation is one of the relatively important organisations of the alternative left, with notable activity in the trade unions and in the indigenous movement.
In the Netherlands, Austria and Australia, the IST groups, although not the largest groups in their respective countries, have a few hundred members.
In Eastern Europe, there are groups in Poland and the Czech Republic.
In Egypt, IST comrades played a central role in organizing the Cairo Conference, which in 2002-2008 was an important forum for denouncing imperialism and Zionism in the Middle East, as well as for the growing social struggles in their country. The alliances created there were key to the 2011 revolution.
The movement has a certain presence in the rest of Africa:
In Nigeria, the Socialist Workers League plays an important role in broader coalitions of struggles.
There has long been a group of the IST in Zimbabwe, which is active in an extremely difficult situation; there are also active nuclei in South Africa, Ghana, Botswana… In Asia, there is a strong and independent organisation in South Korea, Workers Solidarity, as well as groups in Thailand and Pakistan.
Some characteristics of the Current
IST groups have certain identifying characteristics that are sometimes criticized by other tendencies, so it is useful to go beyond the caricature and briefly comment on some of them.Marxist party
The IST bases its strategy and political vision on Marxism. But, as the extensive production of material by the various groups shows, it is neither a static nor a rigid vision.At the outset, it is worth emphasizing what we consider Marxism not to be:
1) The idea—promoted by bourgeois and right-wing sectors, the media, etc.—that Marxism is some kind of totalitarian “plan” and that the systems that call themselves “Marxist” apply or have applied this “theory”; be it the USSR, China, North Korea, Cuba, etc.
2) Stalinism, where texts are effectively “sacred” and can be quoted without contextualizing; it is a vision where Marxism provides “the answers” to all kinds of problems or realities from a highly dogmatic method.
3) Academic Marxism, where Marxism becomes a more or less useful philosophy but is separated from practice; often within this way of approaching Marxism one part or another is taken, but it is not a theory that has a global vision of the system.
4) Eclectic Marxism: As a reaction to Stalinist dogmatism and an expression of the argument that Marxism “does not explain everything,” especially the social phenomena that have appeared since the nineteenth century, the idea has emerged that Marxism is “one theory among several revolutionary theories.”
The IST understands Marxism as a method of analysis, a guide to action. Thus, this method is applied to concrete reality and modified based on real changes in a world that is always changing.
It is not a question of Marxism “not explaining” this or that phenomenon, but of applying the method to the problems that revolutionaries face.
For example, Marx and Engels did not say anything about LGBTI+ liberation, but that does not mean that Marxism cannot tell us anything about these issues, but that they must be analyzed from a Marxist perspective. In this sense, and not in any dogmatic sense, Marxism is a comprehensive theory that provides a method of analyzing reality in its entirety. At the same time, it is important to insist that Marxism is not a magic wand; it obviously “does not have the answer to everything.”
The oppression of women
The IST advocates a Marxist analysis of the roots of women's oppression and, as a consequence, an orientation that sees the struggle against women's oppression as part of the struggle for socialism. In contrast, the idea of the existence of a patriarchy parallel to the socio-economic system and social classes is widespread, of course, within the feminist movement and also on the radical left.The existence of a patriarchy separate from the type of society, whether capitalist, “socialist” or other, could mean that the oppression of women does not have a material basis established in historical development, but would be above such conditions, remaining in the sphere of ideas.
Of course, there is no single theory about the existence of patriarchy. The materialist version of this theory explains that it has a “material” basis, since all men would benefit from such oppression. But as Marxists we look at the content of things and not just their forms.
While it is clear that repressive sexist attitudes are found at all levels of society, the central question is whether the majority of working-class men actually objectively benefit from their class being divided, with one half oppressed by the other half.
For Marxism, the origins of women's oppression are rooted in the divisions between social classes that emerged thousands of years ago. Obviously, since then it has deepened to become a highly repressive element, although mutating in different social systems.
Specifically, with the advent of capitalism, the family form that emerged in the service of the new system is at the heart of the specificity of this oppression in our time. The elimination of the class system opens up the possibility of women's liberation, but it does not guarantee it. That is why the struggle against the oppression of women must be a central struggle for revolutionary socialism, before and after the revolution.
The existence of patriarchy has very clear political consequences, consequences that the feminist movement accepts: that the struggle for women's liberation is an autonomous struggle from the struggle for socialism.
The IST's position is therefore sometimes misinterpreted as if it did not recognise the existence of women's oppression and, as a result, did not participate in the fight against such oppression.
In fact, IST groups participate, for example, in the struggle for the defence of abortion, for equal pay, for women's employment, against any discrimination based on gender, both within society and within the labour and popular movement, and in the denunciation of male violence. While in any of these struggles it is women who must take the lead at all levels, the IST also insists on the militant and active commitment of men in such struggles.
Party building
The need to organize politically, to build a pole of attraction for the most combative people, is one of the most important lessons of the many experiences of revolutionary movements over the last 150 years. That is why our movement attaches special importance to the question of the dissemination of its ideas and membership.In this vein, IST groups have always produced a wide variety of publications: a flagship weekly newspaper, the Socialist Worker , monthly magazines, monthly newspapers and newsletters, as well as pamphlets and books on a wide range of subjects. This follows the tradition of the communist movement of using its press as a bridge to reach the people. The party press functions as a scaffolding: it is a very important part of the organisation of the membership.
Selling newspapers is seen as a way not only to disseminate the party's ideas, but also to connect with people around the party. It also aims to offer readers - whether they are members or not - arguments and information to help them become activists in practice.
The IST has an open membership policy. It also advocates the need to ask people to join. Such a policy opens the door not only to a minority of activists, but also to broader layers of people who do not necessarily have militant experience, but want to collaborate with the political organization. Sometimes, there have been problems with this attitude to membership policy; both in the sense of signing up people who then disappear quite quickly (creating false hopes about the progress and possibilities of the party) and in terms of disturbing other activists in spaces of shared activity.
However, not asking for membership or seeking new members is much more negative than any problems caused by militant enthusiasm. Not renewing membership is risking stagnation and, worse still, showing contempt for unorganized people. A revolutionary party is not built on passivity.
Internal democracy
The absence of permanent factions and the fact that many of the groups in the movement define themselves as “Leninist” have given rise to accusations of “authoritarian” methods and structures. The reality is very different.Since a revolutionary party is not a future miniature socialist society, internal democracy cannot be separated from the type of organization that one wants to build.
Democracy within a revolutionary party is necessary so that the party itself can relate its political line to concrete reality constantly. At the same time, the party has to be able to react quickly and in a united manner. Democracy must allow for the highest level of discussion and the highest level of unity in action. Permanent factions can mean institutionalizing divisions within the party and impede effective action.
We believe that the existence or absence of permanent tendencies in a revolutionary party is related to the nature of each organization. For example, in a broader anti-capitalist party where tendencies with different trajectories coincide, the best way to ensure loyal and constructive collaboration would be to openly acknowledge differences.
However, it would be absurd to claim that internal democracy is working perfectly. In fact, between 2008 and 2010, in some organisations of the movement, there was a more in-depth debate on the whole functioning of democracy in recent years. The result was the introduction of a whole series of measures intended to increase membership participation and improve the forms of debate.
Party and social movements
The IST has a long history of participating in and sometimes leading very diverse struggles, campaigns and movements because party building is not seen as a parallel activity to its interventions in social struggles and movements, nor as a substitute for such interventions. Building movements, campaigns and political spaces that are as broad and inclusive as possible is key, but this does not mean that the party loses its identity within them or hides its ideas within them.The unitary policy of the IST is centred on the tactic of the “united front”: the idea of finding maximum unity in practice without the parts of the front having to lose their political independence. The policy of the united front is not, and cannot be, a uniform policy; the characteristics of each united front and each campaign are different and depend on the context and possibilities of each.
This orientation does not mean “denying the autonomy of social movements” – this autonomy will exist with or without the participation of militants from political organizations – but rather understanding that the party does not exist in a vacuum; that it has to be part of the movements and struggles while maintaining its own identity and political independence. The alternative is to immerse oneself in the movements and adapt politically to them, which, from our point of view, calls into question the reasons why a revolutionary party should exist.
Intervention in a particular space or campaign is not a question unrelated to any more general analysis of the political situation, but a strategic question. Not all campaigns, or even movements, have the same importance all the time. Relevance depends on the situation of the class struggle as a whole.
Above all, a relatively small organisation must have clear priorities. These priorities are above the moral significance of this or that mobilisation or movement and depend on the political possibilities and its strategic position in the struggle at a more general level; hence the need for a revolutionary party to be able to change course, sometimes with a certain speed. If it is not capable of doing this, it would be more like an immovable or impermeable entity, in other words: a sect, than a combat organisation and a party capable of intervening in a changing world.
Practically the only field of political work that is always a priority for us is the trade union movement, as it is the most basic place of collective organisation of the working class. Trade unionism is a very specific space where revolutionaries must constantly intervene, both in very basic tasks such as the defence and improvement of working conditions and in trying to increase the level of political awareness of workers.
More information about the IST can be found on our website:
The International Socialist Tendency | The International Socialist Tendency
internationalsocialists.org
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Julio was right: five predictions by Anguita that the 21st century has proven right :
By Diego Diaz AlonsoMay 16, 2020
Julio Anguita - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre
Julio Anguita - Wikipedia
Today (2020), Julio Anguita 's heart stopped beating . After a week of fighting for survival, the former secretary general of the PCE
Partido Comunista de España - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre
Communist Party of Spain - Wikipedia
Izquierda Unida (España) - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre
United Left (Spain) - Wikipedia
Sumar (coalición) - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre
Sumar (electoral platform) - Wikipedia
Julio Anguita being Córdoba's First Mayor
Official institutional tribute funeral acts in Córdoba's City Hall.
At the head of the coalition, Anguita achieved the best electoral results for the alternative left since 1979, only surpassed in 2015 by the emergence of PODEMOS and its confluences .
Podemos - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre
Podemos (Spanish political party) - Wikipedia
During his time at the head of IU in the 1990s, he was harshly attacked by the mainstream media, especially those linked to the Prisa Group , which had a decisive cultural influence among the progressive public. Presented as a quixotic character and out of touch with reality, Anguita was nevertheless right in many of his predictions made in a decade of the 1990s marked by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the triumph of the USA and its allies in the Cold War .
He was going against the current in a Spanish society where the effects of neoliberalism were beginning to be felt, but which had not yet experienced on a massive scale the job insecurity and cuts to the Welfare State that would come with the great crisis of 2008. For this reason, it would be after the crisis and the 15M,
Movimiento 15-M - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre
Anti-austerity movement in Spain - Wikipedia
Here are five predictions made by the former coordinator of IU in the 1990s, which time has proven right:
Europe and the need for an alliance of southern countries
Anguita was very belligerent against the European model enshrined in the Maastricht Treaty . Unlike Antonio Gutiérrez, leader of CCOO,
Comisiones Obreras - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre
Workers' Commissions - Wikipedia
In June 1992, after the defeat of the Maastricht Treaty in the Danish referendum, he asked Spain to renegotiate the agreement and advocate a common front with the countries of southern Europe to counterbalance the influence of a reunited Germany in the EU.
The IU coordinator warned of a euro crisis, and maintained that the construction of the Union could not begin with the single currency, but that this should be in any case the final result of a prior process of harmonization in labor and fiscal matters of the economies of the richest and poorest Europe.
He also rejected the independence of the European Central Bank from any democratic control and warned that meeting the deficit targets for accessing the single currency would favour, under the pretext of reducing indebtedness, the privatisation of the Spanish public sector and limit the expansion of a welfare state that is still poorly consolidated like the Spanish one.
He also pointed out that without a currency of its own to devalue in order to make exports more competitive, Spanish governments would resort to successive labour reforms to “devalue” workers’ wages.
Corruption in the Royal House
In 1977, the PCE "froze" the republican claim to achieve its legalisation. Accepting the Monarchy would become a test of its will for reconciliation and to achieve a peaceful and consensual Transition(1975–1982).
Transición española - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre
Spanish transition to democracy - Wikipedia
In 1996, at the PCE party rally , Anguita took the tricolour flag out of the freezer and supported a referendum on Monarchy or Republic.
The sector of IU closest to the PSOE and the leaders of Iniciativa Per Catalunya, the Catalan partner of the coalition, would attack him for these statements, which broke with the constitutional consensus.
Spanish Socialist Workers' Party - Wikipedia
Federal reform of the State and negotiated solution to the Basque problem
Euskal Autonomia Erkidegoa - Wikipedia, entziklopedia askea.
País Vasco - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre
Basque Country (autonomous community) - Wikipedia
He also defended the participation of Ezker Batua , the Basque federation of IU, in the so-called Pact of Lizarra , a forum led by the PNV and the Basque left, which operated during the ETA truce of 1998-2000.
ETA (separatist group) - Wikipedia
At a time of great political tension, marked by attacks and murders, Anguita supported opening a dialogue with the Basque independence movement to abandon violence , called for the clarification of the responsibilities of Felipe González and the PSOE in the dirty war against ETA, and the humanisation of the prison conditions of imprisoned terrorists.
The participation of IU alongside the nationalists was highly criticised and meant a strong erosion for the left-wing coalition, not in the Basque Country, but in the rest of Spain.
However, the end of ETA and its abandonment of arms during Zapatero's mandate would be achieved not by exclusively police and judicial means, but after intense negotiations between the Basque socialists, with Jesús Eguiguren at the head, and Arnaldo Otegi, leader of Bildu.
EH Bildu - Wikipedia
Bet on industry, the public sector and limits on bank profits
Anguita was very critical of the economic policy of Felipe González and later of José María Aznar.
He said that it tended towards deindustrialisation and the specialisation of Spain in the tourist sector, real estate and exports with low added value . As an alternative, he proposed a public bank and maintaining a public industrial sector that would function as a “compass” or locomotive for the rest of the Spanish economy.
This was what he presented in May 1993 before the College of Economists of Madrid and the Spanish Association of Finance Executives, in a conference, in “foreign land”, as the newspaper EL PAÍS would describe it in its report. At that meeting, before 500 listeners, the coordinator of IU would also explain the need to limit the profits of the banks. “A professor of Economics praised Anguita at the end of the event in these terms: You have presented yourself as Daniel before the lions and you have come out unscathed ”, pointed out the columnist of a newspaper as unfriendly to the Andalusian politician as EL PAÍS.
The Covid19 crisis has highlighted the weakness of the Spanish industrial fabric and its extreme dependence on tourism . Today, surveys reveal that the majority of Spaniards are in favour of recovering public companies and demanding that the banks repay the bank bailout .
Planned obsolescence , robotization and reduction of the working day
Anguita warned of the ecological crisis in the 1993 campaign, and spoke of the need to end the planned obsolescence of consumer goods. The IU coordinator pointed out the importance of manufacturing robust, long-lasting goods, instead of disposable products .
Today we know that by extending the life of electronic devices by one year, the emission of nearly 4 million tons of CO2 per year could be reduced, a figure that would be equivalent to eliminating two million cars from European roads.
In 1993, that sounded like Chinese, as El PAÍS journalist Maruja Torres acknowledged in her article “A robust candidate” about a rally by Anguita in Huelva: “a fair country, a country without soap operas and with something that I believe I call planned obsolescence, which means that it is enough for everything to break, and that a refrigerator and a mini-blender and everything we need have to be robust goods, and not be breaking down every now and then for nonsense, diminishing the direct salary that is received.”
Today, the ecological crisis, the circular economy and the end of planned obsolescence are part of public policies around the world, as well as the future Climate Change Law that is going to be approved in Spain.
The future of employment in the age of robotisation was also a major concern for Anguita.
In his public interventions, the Cordoban explained that with the new technological advances, economic growth would not mean full employment.
In 1998, as an alternative to the unemployment problem, IU promoted a campaign to reduce the working week to 35 hours, just as the so-called plural left government, made up of socialists, greens and communists, would do in France.
The idea was to achieve a reduction in the working week without a reduction in wages, in order to distribute employment and improve the quality of life of employed people.
The large unions did not want to accompany IU in the mobilisations that it promoted in defence of the 35-hour week together with social movements and minority unions. The recipes that successive Spanish governments finally imposed with the aim of reducing unemployment were to make dismissal conditions cheaper and to start the generalisation of what has been called precariousness.
A new word at that time.
1995 interview
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Yolanda Diaz, the Communist Vice-President of the Spanish government and Minister of Labor and Social Economy :
Yolanda Díaz - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre
Yolanda Díaz - Wikipedia
Communist Party of Spain - Wikipedia
Second Vice President of the Government and leader of Sumar, Yolanda Díaz;
Social-communist government.
Yolanda Díaz expresses her communist activism: “The capitalist system is leading us to disaster”
The leader of Sumar has also stated that "there is no room for free women in the country of the masculinity of Mr. Feijóo (right, Popular Party) and Abascal (ultraright, VOX) "
Madrid 01/14/2024
The Vice President of the Government and leader of Sumar, Yolanda Díaz –affiliated to the Communist Party of Spain (PCE) since 1986– has stated during a rally of the 'magenta' party that «the very inertia of the capitalist economic system takes us and leads us to disaster ; because this is where we are going, to environmental disaster, and to disaster for lives ».
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This is what Díaz said at a Sumar rally in Madrid, where, in economic matters, she also pointed out that "democracy has to reach the economy, without a doubt, and the jobs. It should really be the public thing that decides the economic reasons of our country, and it would be a serious attack and risk if, as has happened for a long time, they were the ones that governed the economic destiny ."
Sumar leader and Second Vice President and Minister of Labor and Social Economy, Yolanda Díaz, during a Sumar EP event
Regarding social policies, the vice president has indicated –in an unclear manner– that “if we know how to leave something behind it is the domination of women , their lack of freedom, but also the lack of freedom that implies for men a form of masculinity that is accompanied by the obligation to dominate women, a form of masculinity that we do not share, which we have seen in the Madrid Assembly with Mr. Smith attacking our colleague Edu Rubiño , who is with us today (sic)”. “There is no room for free women in the country of Mr. Feijóo(P.P.) and Abascal’s (VOX) masculinity” , she added.
Ortega Smith says he does not apologize for his conduct in the Plenary because there is a "double standard" with Vox
The Debate
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Trotsky, tragic hero
September 3, 2020by Horace Tarcus *
Robert Capa/Photographs Leon Trotsky lecturing Danish students on the history of the Russian revolution, Copenhagen, Denmark, November 27, 1932, Capa's coverage of Trotsky's lecture was his first published story. Running for shelter during air raid, Barcelona, January 1939 Fair, Seville, 1935Returning to the figure of the Russian revolutionary allows us to reposition the subject at the crossroads of history, to resume our work of mourning and to acknowledge an intellectual and moral debt. The 80th anniversary of Trotsky's assassination at the hands of an agent of Stalin is a more propitious occasion for exercising memory than for a ritual repetition.
On August 21, 2020, it was 80 years since the assassination of Leon Trotsky by an agent of Stalin, when the Russian revolutionary was in exile in Mexico.
An intense life that had perhaps kept pace with the revolutions of the 20th century like no other had come to a tragic end.
A clandestine militant under Tsarism, a brilliant journalist, a prophet of the revolutions in Russia, deported to Siberia, exiled from country to country, president of the Petrograd Soviet, an ally of Lenin and strategist of October 1917, organizer of the Red Army, opponent of the course taken by the Soviet process under Stalin's dictatorship, deported again, exiled again, and finally assassinated.
Trotsky seems to embody in modern times the classic figure of the tragic hero.
Born in 1879 in a small Ukrainian village, Leon Davidovich Bronstein was the fifth child of a middle-class Jewish farming family.
Educated in cosmopolitan Odessa, he quickly abandoned his university studies to devote himself to revolutionary journalism and politics.
Imprisoned in several Russian cities and deported to Siberia, he travelled to Vienna, London, Zurich and Munich, where he took part in the debates between the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions of Russian Social Democracy.
He returned to St Petersburg, later renamed Petrograd, in early 1905 to become the main leader of the city's Soviet when the first Russian revolution broke out. Once again arrested and exiled in Siberia, he wrote the famous thesis on the "permanent revolution", according to which in a world system dominated by capitalism, the bourgeois revolutions of the backward countries would overlap with the socialist revolutions.
He travelled again to cities of Russian exile such as London, Berlin, Vienna, Paris, Barcelona and New York, before returning hastily to Russia after the outbreak of the February Revolution of 1917, where he would be called upon to play a leading role.
Just three years ago, it was a century since October 6, 1917, when the masses of Petrograd elected Leon Trotsky to preside over their city's Soviet.
While the other great Russian leader, Lenin, was working out Bolshevik strategy from his hiding place in Helsinki, Trotsky not only resided in the city that would be the epicentre of the revolution, but had by then become a popular orator, addressing large contingents of workers almost daily using the facilities of the Petrograd Modern Circus as a platform.
Ten days later he was presiding over the city's Military Revolutionary Committee, which stormed the Winter Palace that President Alexander Kerensky had adopted as the seat of the Provisional Government after the overthrow of the Tsar.
Such was his connection with the revolution that he turned 38 on the same day that he stormed the Winter Palace in October 1917. But the rationalist and atheist Trotsky did not attach any significance to this fact. As he wrote in My Life , one of the most fascinating books of the 20th century: " A Pythagorean or a mystic would draw some great conclusions from this. The truth is that I did not think about this curious coincidence until three years had passed since the October days ."
Trotsky was not only the tribune of the Petrograd Soviet and the architect of the seizure of power. He was also the one who negotiated with the central powers in the city of Brest-Litovsk for Russia's exit from the war, the organizer of the Red Army that fought on several fronts at the same time against the White armies of the counterrevolution, the promoter of accelerated Soviet industrialization, the strategist of the Communist International who kept up to date with notable knowledge of the political events in Germany, England, France and China.
At the same time, he was the writer who found time to produce in 1923, in the midst of the turmoil of the revolution, works such as Literature and Revolution or Problems of Everyday Life .
Trotsky was not only a great writer, he was also a great reader. As he led a wandering life for much of his life, he used to frequent the public libraries of the cities in which he lived. Times of ebb and flow, even in prison, favoured the organisation of reading and study projects among militants, as well as more extensive historical-political assessments.
The more agitated times of mobilisation, on the other hand, left little room for this type of sustained effort. Nevertheless, Trotsky found a way to continue reading and writing. This is what he acknowledges in My Life , his autobiography written during his exile on the Turkish island of Prinkipo, after his expulsion from the Soviet Union:
“For me the best and most precious products of civilization have always been – and still are – a well-written book, with some new thought on its pages, and a sharp pen with which I can communicate my own thoughts to others. The desire to learn has never abandoned me, and how often, in the midst of the bustle of my life, have I been plagued by the feeling that revolutionary work prevented me from studying methodically! Yet nearly a third of a century of that life has been entirely devoted to the revolution. And if I were to begin living again, I would unhesitatingly continue along the same path.”
Thus, during his exile in Turkey and France, and later in Mexico, he carried his vast library with him. One of his greatest achievements as a writer was the two volumes of his History of the Russian Revolution . Like Thucydides, who had been a strategist in Athens and author of the History of the Peloponnesian War , Trotsky was at the same time a protagonist and a historian.
Trotsky already appears to his contemporaries as one of the great historical figures of the twentieth century. Although it is possible to find in the nineteenth century notable examples of figures who could brilliantly combine statesmanship and thinkership at the same time – I think of a Jefferson, a Thiers, or a Sarmiento – in the twentieth century there was not an abundance of intellectuals in power, except for isolated cases such as Thomas Masaryk at the head of the Czech Republic, or more recently Fernando Henrique Cardoso in Brazil.
Trotsky appears as an extraordinary case in which the revolutionary statesman and the thinker of international importance are inseparably united, the Thucydides capable of leading a revolution and a few years later having a historic book dedicated to it.
But Trotsky was also the protagonist of an unprecedented historical drama: a revolutionary who, just six years after seizing power, rejected the course that the “workers’ state” he himself had helped to forge was taking. The epic drama now gave way to tragedy.
Once again, as happened a century ago in France, the Revolution was devouring its own children. But here one of them, perhaps the most brilliant, dared to challenge fate.
Trotsky appears before the world as the protagonist of a tragedy in the classical sense of the term, in which the hero, although he knows the historical course that fate has already set, cannot but assume the revolutionary duty of challenging it. Trotsky did not believe, of course, in a predetermined destiny, but as a classical Marxist he knew that the historical dynamic – in the Soviet Union and throughout the world – had taken a course that was very difficult to change, and that the balance of forces was absolutely unfavorable to him.
As Guillermo Cabrera Infante wrote in his novel "Tres tristes tigres": Trotsky was the " prophet of a heretical religion: messiah and apostle and heretic in one piece ."
When, in the words of Victor Serge, it was midnight in the century, or times of darkness, as Hannah Arendt called the 1930s, Trotsky's texts illuminated a ray of lucidity while offering a certain optimism (at least a historical optimism, displaced towards the future). Only a very small portion of the world then joined the ranks of Trotskyism, but from all corners of the globe the itinerary and the words of the wandering Jew whom no State dared to accommodate were followed with expectation.
Exiled, persecuted, even besieged, whether taking refuge on a distant island in Turkey or in the Mexico of General Lázaro Cárdenas, Trotsky was capable of publishing in the space of ten years hundreds of articles and a dozen books that offered precious keys to understanding present history. With his internationalist vision, his cosmopolitan culture and his command of half a dozen modern languages, he was able to lucidly analyse the emergence of fascism in Germany, the tragedy of the Spanish revolution wrapped in a civil war, the France of the Popular Front, the decline of the British Empire, the bureaucratisation of the Soviet Union, the situation of the Chinese communists or the limits of economic policies under the New Deal.
Trotsky faced the greatest test that history can subject a revolutionary to: his disagreement with the results of the revolution.
Lenin saw this in his last years of life, describing the Soviet Union, which he himself had contributed to forging as no one else, as a “workers’ state with bureaucratic deformations.”
But he did not live to face them. Trotsky had to take up the baton of the struggle against party bureaucracy and state bureaucracy. His theory of bureaucracy, set out in Whither Russia? (unfortunately translated as The Revolution Betrayed ), is one of the greatest achievements of 20th-century political thought. At the same time, his political defeat at the hands of Stalin is the key to the tragedy of socialism in the 20th century. Because the confrontation between Trotsky and Stalin is not, as is often presented, a mere personal dispute between two leaders for state power, but the expression of two antagonistic ways of understanding social processes.
With the failure of the revolution in the West, the Russian Revolution was left to its own devices. The establishment of a modern socialist system in a backward and isolated region of the world was not in the perspective of the Bolsheviks, nor had it been foreseen in Marxist theory. As Trotsky's main biographer, Isaac Deutscher, pointed out:
« According to the classical Marxist scheme, the revolution was to occur when the productive forces of the old society had so outstripped their property relations that they destroyed the old social structure. The revolution was to create new property relations and the new structure for fully developed, advanced and dynamic productive forces. What actually happened was that the revolution created the most advanced forms of organisation for the most backward economies; it established structures of ownership and social planning around underdeveloped and archaic productive forces, and partly around a vacuum. The theoretical Marxist conception of the revolution was thus turned upside down. The new relations of production, being above the existing productive forces, were also beyond the comprehension of the majority of the population; and the revolutionary government defended and developed them against the will of the majority. Bureaucratic despotism took the place of Soviet democracy. The State, far from gradually withering away, acquired a ferocious power that recognised no precedent .»
This conflict between the Marxist norm and the reality of the revolution was becoming exposed in the course of the 1930s.
Stalinism consisted in overcoming the conflict by accepting “reality” and discarding the “norm”: “We will call this what we have” “socialism,” Stalin said. As we would say today, “it is what it is.” Trotsky, by contrast, had the audacity to declare, just five years after the October Revolution, that socialism was unviable in an isolated country. Trotskyism, Deutscher argued, was an attempt to establish a provisional balance between the norm and reality “until the revolution in the West resolved the conflict and restored harmony between theory and practice.”
But in the world after Trotsky's death, the "norm" and "reality" were to become even more abysmal. The revolution did not spread in the post-war period through the capitalist West but through its periphery. Bolshevik-type organisations, whether communist or Trotskyist, proved incapable of understanding that the hegemony of the Western bourgeoisies, even with its periodic crises, was infinitely more solid than Tsarist domination.
The collapse of the Soviet bureaucracy was not, in the end, due to a political revolution driven by the Russian working class, but to a capitalist restoration.
The world of the second half of the twentieth century bore little resemblance to the one Trotsky had imagined. As Daniel Bensaïd himself acknowledged in his book Les Trotskyismes (2007), “ Trotsky knew neither the extermination camps, nor the final solution, nor the use of the atomic weapon, nor the birth of the new world order in Yalta and Potsdam .” The failure of the political movement founded by Trotsky in 1938, the Fourth International, undoubtedly had something to do with the emergence of a totally unforeseen reality in the post-World War II world.
Capitalism emerged from its crisis with an unexpected expansion during the so-called “thirty glorious years” (1945-1975). The productive forces, far from coming to a standstill, experienced new industrial revolutions. The autonomy of the working class in the West was neutralized by the integration policies of the Welfare State. With difficulties in interpreting the new international scenario, the Trotskyist movement clung to Trotsky’s letter. The need for renewal or reworking of the program collided with the resistance of the most orthodox, generating new divisions and mutual accusations in terms of “deviation” and “betrayal” (of the “norm”). In his now classic book Considerations on Western Marxism (1976), Perry Anderson wrote that the prolonged defeat of the international proletariat and the conditions of marginalization that these conditions imposed on Trotskyist organizations left their mark on this tradition:
«Its challenge to the spirit of the times […] imposed its own particular hardships. The reaffirmation of the validity and reality of the socialist revolution and proletarian democracy, against so many facts that denied it, involuntarily inclined this tradition towards conservatism. The preservation of classical doctrines took priority over their development. Triumphalism in the cause of the working class and catastrophism in the analysis of capitalism, affirmed in a more voluntary than rational way, were to be the typical vices of this tradition in its most routine forms.»
The movement founded by Trotsky paid a high price for its out-of-touchness with reality. It fragmented even before it was born; and fragmentation into small or medium-sized sects throughout the world was its hallmark, from 1938 to the present.
And yet, Trotsky's figure remained relevant. His books are republished in all modern languages and new generations are enthused by his vibrant prose. The figure of an unyielding revolutionary continues to constitute an ethical-political reference for each new generation. A sign of this is the international success of the novel by the Cuban Leonardo Padura based on Trotsky's life, The Man Who Loved Dogs , published in 2009, translated throughout the world.
But there are also dimensions of Trotsky's thought that come down to us: for example, his global vision of capitalism, his cosmopolitan conception of culture, his dialogue with the different avant-garde schools that flourished in the Soviet Union in the 1920s (Russian formalism, constructivism, futurism), with psychoanalysis, with surrealism in the 1930s; his social theory of power continue to be unavoidable references for contemporary critical thought. Trotsky wrote in the mid-1930s:
“ Power is not a thing to be seized, seized, or taken away. Power is a social relation between social forces .”
This was half a century before Michel Foucault developed his relational theory of power.
Many historians and contemporary thinkers on politics, power, and social imaginaries owe Trotsky enormous debt, if we think of such disparate figures as James Burnham and Perry Anderson, Claude Lefort and Cornelius Castoriadis, Daniel Bensaïd, Michael Löwy, Eric Toussaint and Enzo Traverso, Cyril James (the historian from Trinidad and Tobago), and Adolfo Gilly, to mention the most obvious.
Trotsky was the starting point for two great Marxologists of the twentieth century: the Ukrainian Roman Rosdolsky and the American Hal Draper.
In the field of art, one could mention Trotsky's influence on surrealist writers such as André Breton and Benjamin Péret, on the American critics Edmund Wilson and Dwight McDonald, on the modernist writer Pagú and the Brazilian critic Mario Pedrosa, on the filmmaker Ken Loach, or on the young André Malraux and Octavio Paz.
In short, the 80th anniversary of Trotsky's assassination is an occasion to exercise memory rather than a ritual repetition. I believe that the best thing we can do on this occasion is to reposition the subject at the crossroads of history and resume our work of mourning in the recognition of a debt, an intellectual and moral debt that the men and women of the 21st century owe to Trotsky.
*Horacio Tarcus holds a PhD in History from the National University of La Plata (UNLP) and is director of the Center for Documentation and Research on Left-Wing Culture in Argentina (CEDINCI/UNSAM). His books include Marx in Argentina. His First Readers: Workers, Intellectuals, and Scientists (Siglo Veintiuno, Buenos Aires, 2007) and Romantic Socialism in the Río de la Plata (1837-1852) (FCE, Buenos Aires, 2016).
Source: Nueva Sociedad , digital edition, Buenos Aires, August 2020
Cover: Trotsky during a conference in Copenhagen, November 27, 1932, the famous «stained photograph» by Robert Capa (« It is THE photo. The one I had taken and which was the chosen one. The negative was damaged. It has stains and cracks. But it is the best. I had taken a photo of the proletarian revolution itself »)
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Venezuela: “Hard to believe”
Pablo Stefanoni *
August 4, 2024
Protest demonstration after the publication of official results in favour of the re-election of Nicolás Maduro (photo: Matías Delacroix/Associated Press)
The election result in Venezuela raises well-founded doubts, given what happened both during the vote count itself and in the preceding months, and plunges the country back into uncertainty. Does the opposition have a plan B?
Chilean President Gabriel Boric summed up a widespread feeling when the official results of the Venezuelan elections were released with 80% of the votes counted: “ hard to believe .” The way in which the president of the National Electoral Council, Elvis Amoroso, presented the results at midnight only added to the doubts already raised by the electoral campaign and the election day itself, marked by various types of incidents.
Amoroso announced an “ aggression against the transmission system ” to justify the cuts in the data aggregation process, and then read the “first bulletin” that “marks a strong and irreversible trend” in favor of the ruling party with “80% of the tables counted and with a participation level of 59%.” According to these results, Nicolás Maduro would have obtained 51.20% and the opposition candidate Edmundo González, 44.2%.
Finally, the official announced an investigation into “terrorist actions” against the electoral system.
A former deputy of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV)
United Socialist Party of Venezuela - Wikipedia
The opposition demands to be able to verify the minutes.
The president of the National Electoral Council (CNE) of Venezuela, Elvis Amoroso (l), presents an official bulletin, on July 28, 2024, in Caracas (Venezuela). EFE/ Manuel Díaz“From the beginning of our coverage of this campaign, we knew that the day of the presidential elections would not be the end, but would set the tone for the day after,” wrote journalist Raúl Stolk in the English-language newspaper Caracas Chronicles . And the day after anticipates new crises, which could derail the relative reincorporation of the Maduro government into the “international community,” after the recognition by fifty countries of Juan Guaidó as “president in charge” in 2019, which ended - in the context of several cases of corruption in his parallel administration - with a strong erosion of the opposition. The opposition repositioning came from the hand of María Corina Machado, who went from being seen as too ultra to emerging as a leader capable of “re-enchanting” a significant part of the population, even in traditionally Chavista areas.
These elections were particularly complex. The opposition – driven by Machado’s popularity – managed to organise huge demonstrations in favour of the candidacy of Edmundo González, the diplomat chosen by consensus after the leader’s disqualification, who won the opposition primaries with 90% of the votes in October 2023.
Unlike Nicaragua, where Daniel Ortega’s regime simply detained all the opposition members who tried to run for president and then expelled them from the country, in Venezuela the government set out to weaken the opposition in a measured way, with arrests of people close to Machado, disqualifying the most popular candidate for having called for foreign intervention in Venezuela and limiting voting abroad, when there are around five million Venezuelans outside the country (mostly in Colombia, Perú, U.S.A., Brasil, and Spain).
These elections were also the result of negotiations with the opposition and the United States, which involved the easing of oil sanctions. Venezuela also handed over Americans detained in Caracas in exchange for businessman Alex Saab, accused of being a front man for high-ranking Chavista officials and who has returned to the country as a hero and been incorporated into the upper echelons of power. The easing of sanctions allowed Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) to seek agreements with transnational companies .
It was a tug-of-war, in the context of the failure to comply with the agreements, but the situation did not return to the point prior to the negotiations. A sector of the Venezuelan bourgeoisie - which today mixes old and new elites - approached the government some time ago, especially the powerful vice president Delcy Rodríguez, considering that Maduro, within the framework of the relative "normalization" of the economy, was the guarantor of their business.
Nicolas Maduro's campaign rally (photo: Nueva Sociedad)After 25 years of Chavismo and more than a decade
of Maduro in power, these elections were in fact held in the context of the government's effort to show that the crisis is over and that in Venezuela " everything is normal ." Shops and supermarkets full of imported products, new chic restaurants in Caracas, resumption of flights with Spain and Portugal... the mixture of de facto dollarization and economic liberalization caused an abundance effect in the midst of strong social inequalities and with large sectors of the population dependent on state aid or on various legal or illegal hustles - what in Venezuela they call "killing tigers." Many pro-Maduro journalists who traveled to Venezuela during the elections showed that ostentatious Caracas that saw a rebirth of social life - thanks also to a decrease in insecurity, through rather brutal methods - after the worst years of scarcity, urban violence and social collapse, as a refutation of the "lies" about the Venezuelan situation.
Machado, now the undisputed leader of the opposition, was the first to enter the arena, pointing out that Venezuela "has a new president-elect in Edmundo González Urrutia" and that voters gave the opposition "an overwhelming victory." According to her data, González Urrutia won with 70% of the votes against 30% for Maduro.
After years of divisions between those in favour of participating in the electoral game and those in favour of boycotting it, this time there was consensus that the battle should take place on the electoral terrain, in a context of Maduro's sharp decline in popularity. The "Barinas effect" - the defeat of Chavismo in the "land of Chávez" in the 2022 regional elections, thanks to the opposition's unity and perseverance - served to convince radicals, like Machado herself, of the usefulness of competing at the polls and abandoning insurrectional fantasies, which sought to break up the Armed Forces and which, in the end, ended up benefiting the government, which usually accuses the opposition of being "coup plotters."
Maria Corina Machado and Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia at the closing of the campaign in Zulia. X/@JuanPGuanipa)Coming from the hard wing of the opposition and the Caracas elite, María Corina earned a combative image more than a decade ago, when she challenged Hugo Chávez to a debate and he responded that she should first win the opposition primaries, to be on a par with him, since "eagles don't hunt flies." The leader of Vente Venezuela was one of the leaders of the street protests called "La Salida" in 2014, and generally positioned herself on the hard wing of the opposition, benefiting in fact from an official policy - of repression and electoral manipulation - that discredited the moderates. In the end, Machado won the primaries that Chávez demanded of her. And her turnout was particularly massive in the interior of Venezuela, far removed from the new economic "normality" of Caracas. María Corina managed to articulate a trans-ideological block with moderate sectors, in favor of the recovery of an institutional framework in which political and social disputes can be processed. This is the case, among others, of the Citizen Platform in Defense of the Constitution , which includes former ministers from the Hugo Chávez era who have distanced themselves from "Madurism."
The government sought, in advance, to legitimize the electoral result with massive campaign events, which would show popular support and recall those “reddish red” tides of the Chavez era, when the Bolivarian process compensated with gigantic doses of epic its deficiencies in management. But bureaucratic cliques, and sometimes mafia-like, ended up replacing what there was of popular energy. Maduro himself emphasized the military-police dimension of the current regime. “We are a military power, because the Bolivarian National Armed Forces support me, it is Chavista, it is Bolivarian, it is revolutionary; we are a police power. We are the perfect civic-military-police union,” he said a few days before the elections. He also spoke of “a bloodbath” if the right came to power.
It is difficult to imagine that Maduro would "normally" hand over power, since Bolivarianism is a network of power and business, involving old and new bourgeoisies, and the military leadership itself. In the so-called PDVSA-crypto plot, which triggered a purge within Chavismo that led to the fall of the once powerful oil minister Tareck El Aissami, it is estimated that the stolen money could reach 16 billion dollars. More than 65 officials and businessmen were arrested in this Bolivarian "perestroika . "
The discourse of the left-wing camp , which considers that, at the end of the day, between Maduro and María Corina Machado it is necessary to opt for the former because the opposition is seeking social rights and the delivery of public assets (through the privatization of PDVSA), tends to overlook the dimension of the plunder and the dynamics of the "predatory State" into which the Bolivarian Revolution derived. When it is said that María Corina is Javier Milei, it is intended to ignore that while the latter intends to "destroy the State from within", on the basis of his delirious paleo-libertarianism , the Maduro government has been destroying it in fact, with a revolutionary rhetoric: it has caused a collapse of health and education services and has collapsed oil production. In that sense, the "worker president" Maduro is not the opposite of Milei, but rather both are the opposite of a social State sustained by a solid democratic institutionality.
The Venezuelan Communist Party itself
Partido Comunista de Venezuela - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre
Communist Party of Venezuela - Wikipedia
The pro-Maduro or “Maduro-sympathetic” left – which blames all the problems on US sanctions – also rarely considers that the Venezuelan case acted as a scarecrow in the region, to the detriment of the left. As the only country that declared itself socialist after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Venezuelan case was a great asset for the Latin American right since the mid-2010s, in a region that began to fill with Venezuelan immigrants as proof of the failure of “socialism”, synonymous with economic chaos and human rights violations.
In the coming days, we will witness the continuation of the insult show between Maduro and Milei. Maduro accused the Argentine president of being a “sadistic sociopath,” a “Nazi” and a “cowardly, ugly and stupid bug,” and Milei denounced him as a “communist dictator,” promoter of “misery, decadence and death.” “Dictator, get out,” she tweeted… The controversy is a gain for both.
Today, all eyes are on Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – Wikipédia, a enciclopédia livre
Lula da Silva sent Celso Amorin, his foreign policy representative, to Caracas, who keeps him informed from there.
Meeting between Nicolás Maduro and Celso Amorin in March 2023.Maduro, for his part, with the support of China and Russia, will bet that the foam will subside and that he will remain the de facto and de jure president. After the failure of the Guaidó strategy, recognizing Edmundo González does not appear on the menu of the "international community." We will have to see what the opposition's plan B is and what the agenda is for the day after these elections, in a country where power has been separated from the verdict of the ballot boxes.
*Editor-in-chief of Nueva Sociedad. Co-author, with Martín Baña, of Everything You Need to Know About the Russian Revolution (Paidós, 2017) and author of Has Rebellion Turned Right-Wing? (Siglo Veintiuno, 2021).
Venezuela: «difícil de creer»
Venezuela: «difícil de creer» Pablo Stefanoni * El resultado electoral en Venezuela plantea dudas fundadas, por lo ocurrido tanto durante el propio conteo de los votos como en los mes…
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