Socialism, Capitalism & Natural Disasters

By Stephen Millies
Published Jan 8, 2011 7:37 AM

It almost never snows in beautiful Cuba. The country’s tallest mountain, Pico Turquino, was last covered with the white stuff in 1864 and 1900.

Cubans would probably rather have a series of blizzards instead of the terrible hurricanes they’ve endured. Capitalist climate change is making things worse. In 2008 alone, Hurricanes Gustav, Ike and Paloma ravaged the Caribbean island. Gustav and Ike struck 10 days apart and did $5 billion worth of damage. Ike destroyed 840,000 acres of sugar cane fields.

But because millions of Cubans were evacuated, just seven people were killed in the 2008 hurricanes. (cubahurricanes.org)

What a contrast to President George W. Bush letting Black and poor people drown and starve in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005. Bush refused offers from Cuba and Venezuela to send help to New Orleans.

Despite a 50-year U.S. economic blockade of their country, Cubans can organize themselves so well because they live in a socialist society. Every member of the Cuban Communist Party is an organizer.

The capitalist party that runs the United States can’t even deal with two feet of snow in New York City. Billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg was useless in the aftermath of the Dec. 26 snowstorm.

Socialism beats capitalism in dealing with cold weather. Throughout the Soviet Union, central heating stations were built that kept people warm in their homes. This sort of social organization is impossible under capitalism, in which housing, heating oil and natural gas are just commodities to be sold at a profit.

Central heating stations were a prime NATO target when socialist Yugoslavia was bombed for 78 days in 1999. President Bill Clinton wanted to freeze people into submission.

Socialism hasn’t been able to prevent earthquakes yet, although Chinese scientists are working at making more accurate predictions.

When Tashkent, the capital of Soviet Uzbekistan, was struck by a huge earthquake on April 26, 1966, every nationality in the Soviet Union pitched in to help their Central Asian sisters and brothers. Within four years, 100,000 new housing units were built and a new subway system was started.

Capitalists actually profit off disasters. They gamble at the Chicago Board of Trade and other such casinos on crop failures. The British East India Company doubled its profits as 10 million people starved to death in Bengal in the 1770s.
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BANGLADESH: Convention offers revolutionary view of underdevelopment

PART 1

By Sara Flounders
Dhaka, Bangladesh
Published Feb 7, 2010 7:54 PM

More than 10,000 people gathered under a sea of red flags to open the First Convention of the Socialist Party of Bangladesh, and then held a militant mass march through Dhaka’s crowded streets. Hundreds of nationally elected delegates and many thousands of participants attended the Dec. 30-31 Convention of the SPB, which was formed in 1980. They presented a powerful challenge to the Western corporate media’s view of Bangladesh.
WW photos: Sara Flounders

Almost the only things we ever hear in connection with Bangladesh are that it is hopelessly poor, densely populated and underdeveloped. But whenever revolutionary forces are organizing in the thousands and tens of thousands with anti-imperialist fervor and a clearly focused Marxist perspective of their own problems, they make a contribution to the understanding of the world movement. This can combat corporate media misinformation and imperialist stereotypes.

The Socialist Party of Bangladesh has 40,000 announced members nationally. The party has also helped to develop a number of mass organizations such as a Socialist Workers Front, a Socialist Agricultural and Peasant Front, a Socialist Women’s Forum, a Progressive Teachers Forum and a very large and active Socialist Student Front. These organizations involve tens of thousands of additional activists.

The Socialist Student Front has announced a major event in mid-March to celebrate the 25th anniversary of its founding. Tens of thousands of students from all the universities and many high schools are expected to attend. It is waging a giant campaign to protest cuts and deterioration of education.

In a country with 60 percent illiteracy, with millions of landless peasants and millions of workers surviving in the most desperate slums, many of the students come from a more privileged background. Students in Bangladesh have a revolutionary tradition and have gone into the streets again and again. For decades the most revolutionary-minded student activists have become determined fighters for the working class.



Communism, socialism and revolutionary ideas are still a strong force throughout the Indian subcontinent. Especially in Bengal, East and West, communist ideas have a great support among the masses, among the intellectuals and middle class. There are a number of left parties in Bangladesh, including some reformist Marxist parties that hold elected office in parliamentary coalition governments of the bourgeois state. The SPB has sought to be a revolutionary challenge, not just a parliamentary opposition.

International guests included representatives from the United Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist, the Sri Lankan New Democratic Party, the Socialist Unity Center of India, the ambassador of the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, and Workers World Party and the International Action Center in the U.S.

The SPB encourages mutual respect, discussion and unified action or united front actions among the many left parties in Bangladesh. The day after the completion of their convention the Socialist Party sponsored a wide-ranging discussion and question and answer session with the international guests who attended their convention and the leadership of more than 10 left parties, along with independent intellectuals, journalists, filmmakers, Marxist economists, etc. — about 150 people in all.

Many guests remarked about how important it was to have these political discussions. The questions to the delegates from the U.S. concerned the nature of the global capitalist crisis and how intractable it is, the impact of ever expanding U.S. militarism, and why President Barack Obama has continued Bush’s imperialist wars.

In India and in Bangladesh as in Europe some socialist and communist parties have entered bourgeois coalition governments to administer the capitalist state. Always on the agenda is a discussion on the nature of the state in underdeveloped and formerly colonized countries and the role of revolutionary forces.

For the representative from Sri Lanka the participants asked about the debacle just experienced by the Tamil Tigers and of the representative from Nepal about the coming showdown with the government which, backed by India and the U.S, is threatening them with a similar fate. State power is a burning and immediate question on the Indian subcontinent.

Imperialist underdevelopment, socialist solutions

In two documents, the Conveners’ Report of the First Convention and the Thesis on the International Situation, presented in preparation for the First Convention, the SPB gave their view of the international situation politically and the global capitalist crisis that is wreaking havoc on a global scale.

The Convention documents contained serious thinking on the problems facing Bangladesh now. They took up the chaos, lack of planning and profiteering at every level of the capitalist market and the intentional underdevelopment imposed by U.S. imperialism through its banking system, the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

As with so many other countries in Asia and Africa, Bangladesh is deliberately kept underdeveloped, dependent and poor. It is used as just a source of cheap labor by U.S. and British policy and increasingly now by Indian capitalists.

The structural adjustments imposed on Bangladesh led to the forced closing of many domestic industries in order to reorient the economy to cheap labor on imported fabric that is exported as garments. These policies have made Bangladesh much poorer. One leader of the SPB stressed again and again in every conversation, “All Western ‘help’ is designed to make us helpless.”

Poverty and unequal distribution in Bangladesh have grown far worse in recent decades. Almost 80 percent of the population is still peasant. But landlessness among the peasantry has grown drastically from 20 percent landless at the time of independence in 1971 to 70 percent of the peasant population reduced to day laborers and indebted sharecroppers without land today.

In a country of 150 million people, 90 million live on the edge of starvation. Millions of workers are forced to go abroad to send home survival remittances.

The SPB explains that the country is fabulously rich in fertile land and a 12-month growing season. Yet more than half the population is seriously malnourished. Though Bangladesh has oil, gas, coal, iron and other minerals, it is denied modern technology and efficient distribution. It is capitalist chaos at its worst.

The SPB provided guests with a great deal of political information, along with an analysis of the many problems facing the country. Each analysis was infused with revolutionary optimism and determination to organize the most desperately poor workers and millions of landless peasants to step into a historic role of challenging capitalist chaos and imperialist domination.


Next, a first-hand view of the struggle in Bangladesh.

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Capitalism & Women's Liberation: 3 Questions

The results are in. The highest rate of anti-female crimes, including rape, sexual violence, domestic violence etc. is in:

NEW DEHLI, INDIA.

Nope, not Tehrehan, not Kabul, not Darfur, not Harare.

The highest crimes against women are going on in New Dehli, India, a free market, Neo-Liberal city. I have a question for 3 political ideologies being promoted in the US:

QUESTION #1

REPUBLICANS: Do you advocate invading India in order to liberate women from the society with the highest rate of violence against them, even though this city is under the economic control of the United States and is not defiant like Iraq and Afghanistan? Bush's invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan were justified with liberating women, so why not India? There's no hidden agenda, right? The U.S. invades, bombs, pillages, and murders out the goodness of its heart, right?

QUESTION #2:

DEMOCRATS: Shall we now be having concert, college campus tables, glossy poster, free CDs, and positive CNN coverage for the Maoists Naxalite Rebels? Will oil companies and Zionist pressure groups be lobbying congress to sanction the indian government and fund the Maoist Communist Revolutionaries? The justification of the liberals "moral outrage" campaign in support of the forces seeking to overthrow the government of Iran is supposedly based on your outrage about the oppression of women. Why does the CIA not start shipping money and guns to the Communists of India? Will I be able to watch a "Concert for the Naxalites" on VH1 next week? Will my college fund "Save Indian Women" tables? Will my college professor distribute free copies of Llakar Magazine? Will Liberal Churches, New Age Meditation Clubs, and Zionist Synagogues send millions of dollars to the Communist Party of India (Maoist) in its struggle to liberate women, one of its state goals?

QUESTION #3:

LIBERTARIANS/CONSTITUTIONALISTS: Why is New Dehli, India the city with the highest crimes against women? All of India excepting the region controlled by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the liberated territories of the Naxalites is free market dominated. I've heard from right wing think tanks and Austrian School propagandists so many times about how capitalism is rescuing people in the impoverished world by "providing jobs" in sweatshops and stealing natural resources? Is the Market Liberating Women? Shouldn't it be Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, Zimbabwe, or Nepal that has the high anti-women crime rates? The free market, contrary to what the propaganda film "Slumdog Millionaire" says, doesn't seem to be freeing the women of India.



VICTORY TO THE COMMUNIST REVOLUTIONARIES OF INDIA!!!! WOMEN HOLD UP HALF THE SKY!!!!