The World Struggle is Boiling

Published Feb 11, 2007 7:24 PM
There is a mighty heroism in all of us. There is a force within every human being that is powerful. It is part of us that wants to fight back. It is the voice in the back of our heads that tells us that, yes, we deserve better than this. It is a voice that tells us another world is possible, if we are willing to drive it into being with the strength of history.

This is the force that tells the Iraqis, the men, the women and the children, to fight back. Everyday Iraqis are being slaughtered by the United States in its criminal war of aggression. The life of Iraqis is getting perpetually worse.

But what do the Iraqis do? Do they submit? Do they surrender to the will of the mighty imperialist empire?

No! They are fighting back. The brutal bombing campaigns of the Gulf War did not stop them. The inhumane and genocidal sanctions that killed millions of Iraqis did not stop them. This invasion has not stopped them. The gallows lynching of their former president did not stop them. They continue to fight back because of the beautiful part of our humanity: the inner instinct of slaves that drives them to fight not to be slaves anymore.

Hugo Chávez represents the aspirations of the millions of workers who live in Venezuela. He is everyday fighting to make real what millions in South America have only dreamed of. He is fighting for socialism, a society where the means of production are in the hands of the workers; a society without a class of exploiters; a society without the horrors of poverty and all the misery that goes along with that.

Everyday Hugo Chávez is proving that socialism as an economic system did not fail. Doctors from socialist Cuba are going to Venezuela and performing eye surgery, and now thousands of Venezuelans, who out of their condition of poverty went blind, have regained their sight.

Chávez is setting up healthcare clinics where anyone can go and see a doctor when they are sick. He is redistributing land to the peasants and giving them a new beginning. He is now in the process of taking the telephone companies, and many other appendages of the imperial stranglehold on Venezuela’s economy, and making them the property of the Venezuelan people, managed not by a corrupt bureaucracy, but by the Venezuelans themselves.

Isn’t it crazy to look back? In 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed, they told us that socialism and communism was dead. They told us that now American capitalism would reign supreme. They told us that we should give up on our dreams of a better world, but they were dead wrong.

The message of Marxism-Leninism is that the world does not have to be this way. There is no need for anyone to be poor. There is no need for anyone to be enslaved. There is no need for any child to be sold into prostitution. There is no need for gay people to be discriminated against and abused. There is no need for racism to run rampant.

There is a way out. There is a path called socialism, and there is an ideology called Marxism-Leninism. We fight for the workers to seize the mills, the factories, the giant farms, and we call for the exploiters to be overthrown. We call for a society where the people are in power, and can determine their own destiny.

—Caleb T. Maupin
Baldwin-Wallace College
FIST chapter Cleveland