T.O. Weekly Int’l Supplement: Lula/Brazil, Our Position on China, IWC Campaign to Free Mumia

The ORGANIZER WEEKLY NEWSLETTER

International Supplement to Issue No. 22

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IN THIS MESSAGE:

• Brazil: Lula Has Been Freed: A Victory for Democracy!

• Brazil: Fachin’s Decision Confirms the 2018 Presidential Election Fraud

• Socialist Organizer: Our Position on China

• IWC Free Mumia Campaign: Endorsements from Senegal; Also attached IWFC Newsletter on Mumia Campaign

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 (1) BRAZIL:  Lula Has Been Freed: A Victory for Democracy!

The March 8 decision by Supreme Federal Court (STF) Justice Edson Fachin to overturn the conviction and restore former President Lula’s civil rights is a victory for workers, the people, and democracy, both in Brazil and internationally.

The trial had only one objective: to prohibit the Workers Party (PT) from running Lula in the 2018 presidential election. It was a maneuver that allowed the fraudulent election of Bolsonaro. The trial took place within the framework of the Lava Jato operation, the so-called “anti-corruption operation” led by Judge Sergio Moro, whom Bolsonaro, after being elected, made Minister of Justice, as a reward for his good and loyal service. The annulment of the conviction confirms the machination, denounced by many international jurists, all the more because no evidence was ever produced during the trial.

This victory would not have been possible without a huge mobilization. Mobilization in Brazil: The International Committee for the Defense of Lula and Democracy in Brazil brought together numerous political, trade union, popular, and cultural organizations. Who doesn’t remember the thousands of activists who took turns working 24 hours a day for more than a year outside Lula’s prison in Curitiba?

Mobilization around the world: In France, for example, the “Free Lula” Committee was formed in April 2018 at the Paris Labor Exchange, in the presence of Luiz Dulci, of the PT leadership. It brought together organizations as diverse as the Paris cell of the Brazilian PT, the CGT departmental union of Paris, the French Communist Party, the Left Party, La France Insoumise (France Unbowed), the Jean-Jaurès Foundation, the Independent Democratic Workers Party (POID), the POI, France-Latin America, and numerous collectives of Brazilians in France.

“Free Lula!” was an elementary democratic demand, regardless of one’s point of view on Lula’s political positions, or on his record as president of Brazil. When repression strikes, unity and solidarity are indispensable.

The annulment of this conviction is only a partial victory. We must still fight to bring to justice ex-judge Moro and his gang of corrupt thugs and prosecutors, who have worked illegally in collaboration with the U.S. government, among others.

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(2) BRAZIL: Fachin’s Decision Confirms the 2018 Presidential Election Fraud

The overturning on March 8 of Lula’s conviction by Supreme Federal Court Justice Edson Fachin no longer leaves any doubt that the 2018 presidential election was rigged to prevent Lula’s electoral victory, and hence to orchestrate the fraudulent “election” of Bolsonaro.

From the standpoint of democracy, Bolsonaro’s “election” represented an all-out assault against the popular will. This means that the annulment of that fraudulent election is needed to restore democracy and sovereignty to the people.

In his press conference at the ABC hall of Metalworkers Union, after Fachin’s decision, Lula said:

“The pain I feel is nothing in the face of the pain that millions of Brazilians are suffering today. Yes, millions of Brazilians are without jobs, without vaccines, without health protection, without the ability to buy food, without schools, without social security and labor rights — all of this just to feed the astronomical profits of the bankers and businessmen.”

Millions of people, as the opinion polls already show, expect Lula to lead the fight to end Bolsonaro’s term of office and in so doing put an end to his health and economic policies. The people want an end to all this suffering.

The question that all of us need to reflect on is this: Can and should the workers and the majority of the people wait until 2022 for the change that is needed. Should we have to wait until then and in the meantime continue to accept the social measures of death and destruction imposed by an illegitimate government in the service of Capital?

We are seeing in neighboring Paraguay at this very moment the popular uprising for the ouster of President Mario Abdo Benitez because of the chaos in his administration’s treatment of the pandemic. That chaos is not so different from what we are experiencing in Brazil at this time. It is possible to think that a similar situation of anguish could generate a similar reaction in our country.

In our opinion, the people have the right to discuss the means needed to forge a government and institutions capable of carrying out their aspirations for survival.

Working class activists have the obligation to place their political, trade union, and popular organizations at the service of a solution that will put an end — now — to the Bolsonaro government and that will establish a workers’ government against the coup plotters and fraudsters.

Communist Internationalist Organization (OCI)

March 11, 2021

Contact: cartaoci@gmail.com

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(3) OCRFI Alarm Manifesto: Our Position on China

Presentation

On November 24, 2020, only a week after he won the presidential election, Joe Biden announced that he would maintain the nearly $1 trillion in punitive tariffs imposed by the Trump administration on Chinese goods. Top Biden advisors interviewed by the International Law Advisory (Steptoe website) explained that, “economic sanctions will play a prominent, if not central, role in Biden policy toward China.”

Once in office, the Biden administration’s pressure on China intensified.

On March 9, 2021, the admiral leading the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, Adm. Philip Davidson, told a Senate Armed Services Committee meeting that, “China is accelerating its ambitions to supplant the United States and our leadership role in the rules-based international order, which they’ve long said they want to do by 2050. … I think the threat is manifest during this decade, in fact in the next six years.” Davidson concluded, “We absolutely must be prepared to fight and win should [this economic] competition turn to conflict.”

On March 18, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan met in Alaska with top China diplomat Yang Jiechi and State Councilor Wang Yi.

Blinken went on the attack: “We will discuss our deep concerns about China’s actions regarding Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Taiwan, cyber-attacks on the United States, and economic coercion of our allies. ” Blinken continued: “Each of these actions threatens the rules-based order that maintains global stability.”

“China,” Blinken concluded, “is the only country with the economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to seriously challenge the stable and open international system, all the rules, values and relationships that make the world work the way we want it to.”

The “international system” Blinken is referring to is the world imperialist system dominated by the United States.

We are publishing below excerpts from the Alarm Manifesto adopted November 9, 2020, by the Alarm Conference of the Organizing Committee for the Reconstitution of the Fourth International / OCRFI. This statement expresses our views on China. — The Editors, The Organizer Weekly newsletter

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OCRFI Alarm Manifesto on China

Relations between China and the United States have been marked by an increasing escalation in the period preceding the emergence of the pandemic. The roots of this escalation have to do with the very nature of the Chinese State. The People’s Republic of China was born out of a revolutionary process that in 1949 saw the revolutionary overthrow of the power of the bourgeoisie. Its peculiarity is that from the moment the bourgeoisie was overthrown, political power was confiscated by a social stratum removed from the control of working people: the bureaucracy that emerged from the apparatus of Stalinism.

It is indisputable that this bureaucracy, especially in recent decades, has worked systematically to open up the Chinese economy, which has been founded since 1949 on the monopoly of State property, to imperialist penetration, especially by the U.S. multinationals.

The specific character of State property has been expressed in the very way the Chinese leadership has dealt with the pandemic. Forced to mobilize the immense resources of State property, the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party has, as a matter of fact, got people out of hospitals in a matter of days (which has not been the case in any of the capitalist powers of Europe and North America). But after mobilizing these gigantic means (which was made possible by the fact that the bureaucracy centralizes State power and the State itself still centralizes ownership of large sectors of the productive forces), the Chinese bureaucracy hastened to make the working class pay for the consequences.

The workers, according to the ruling Chinese bureaucracy, should above all not be allowed to see this as an encouragement to act independently on their own terrain. In no way should the Chinese working class be allowed to seize the opportunity to intervene in its own name. Hence the particularly brutal measures taken by the bureaucracy against the workers and youth in Hong Kong, aimed at terrorizing not only this component of the Chinese population, but through it, all sectors of the proletariat.

This is especially the case because, contrary to all the self-serving propaganda rhetoric that for years presented China as a new El Dorado of capitalism, the brutality of the crisis has caused the destruction of 200 million jobs in China. Hence the entirely contradictory aspect of this situation:

The Chinese bureaucracy, which has provided cheap labor with no rights to multinational corporations around the world, has created the conditions for a rapid and massive concentration of productive forces (at the cost of destroying productive forces in other countries). As a result, it has increased its dependence on the world market and, more precisely, on U.S. finance capital. When the crisis arrived, the mass destruction of productive forces was projected directly onto China, whose goods (unlike during the previous phase) were no longer welcome in the entire world and whose labor was no longer needed. China was impacted directly by the dislocation of the global economy.

This settles the question raised periodically by the capitalist press: Can U.S. leadership in the world economy be jeopardized by “Chinese competition”? The answer is No, not in any way. Since capitalism reached its highest stage, imperialist powers have no longer tolerated the development of autonomous industrialization in “emerging” countries whose economies should henceforth be only a part of the world division of labor controlled by international imperialism.

The violence of Trump and his administration against China for years testifies to the fact that it is not acceptable to U.S. imperialism that any economic development should be able to take place in any country, especially in a country whose economy, resulting from the 1949 revolution, rests on the social basis of the expropriation of capital.

The fact is that today China, with its 350 million to 400 million proletarians, is directly affected by the world crisis. In the previous phase China played an essential stabilizing role for imperialism by providing it with an over-exploitable labor force controlled by the bureaucratic apparatus and its arsenal of repression. Nevertheless, this complex interdependence between China and the U.S. has not at this stage destroyed the social base concentrated in State ownership.

China’s crisis stimulus packages are confronted with the fact that the increase in production would require a call-up from the world market. The Chinese economy is too dependent on the world market for a stimulus plan to be based primarily or even mainly on boosting domestic consumption. The export sector is an indispensable and major driving force for the functioning of the economy as a whole.

In this context, imperialism has been and is led to multiply threats, including military threats, against China, aimed at destroying obstacles to the free movement of goods and capital, which, for the moment, keep preventing the definitive collapse of State ownership. It is not tolerable for U.S. imperialism that this economy of considerable dimensions should be controlled by anything other than the quest for profit and therefore the needs of U.S. imperialism itself.

For the Fourth International, it is clear that the offensive of U.S. imperialism is aimed at the complete dismantling of State property in China, as it did in the past with regard to the Soviet Union. If it succeeds, it will be a major blow not only to the Chinese proletariat, but also to the world proletariat. That is why the Fourth International stands for the unconditional defense of China against U.S. imperialism. Unconditional means without any “conditions” addressed to the bureaucracy. In this support there is no illusion that the bureaucracy will be somehow bestowed with a historically progressive mission.

The resistance of the Chinese working class puts the demand for democracy at its center. This is why the Fourth International, which is unconditionally in favor of the defense of State property in China, does not entrust any historical mission to the bureaucracy and considers that the surest way to preserve the conquests of the 1949 revolution is the struggle by which the Chinese working class in all its components seeks to impose its right to self-organization, to build its independent organizations. It is on the terrain of its independence (including from the bureaucratic State apparatus) that the Chinese working class will preserve its conquests.

For the Fourth International, the fate of the Chinese people cannot be dissociated from the international class struggle.

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(4) IWC – From Senegal: FREE MUMIA ABU-JAMAL NOW!

Mumia is a Black activist and independent journalist accused of murdering a police officer in 1981 in a rigged trial. He was sentenced to death in 1982, after spending 29 years on death row; then his sentence was commuted to life in prison.

Mumia is 66 years old and suffers from congestive heart failure and hepatitis B. He recently tested positive for Covid. If he stays in prison, he will die!

We know how too often in the U.S. judicial system the rights of Black people are violated, ignored and the police killers of Black people are protected.We also know the role of U.S. youth and workers in the struggle against Apartheid in the past and against racism in the U.S. today.

We are political activists of the labor movement, trade unionists, leaders or members of student unions, pan-Africanists, young people, women, citizens attached to democracy from all across Senegal, and we join the internationalist campaign of the International Workers Committee (IWC) to demand:

Free Mumia immediately!

(list of 83 endorsers)

Saint Louis

 Université Gaston Berger ; Boubacar Sow président amicale étudiante, Mourtala Faye étudiant , Babacar Diouf juriste, Serge Mané étudiant infographiste, Mamadou Diouf étudiant en droit, Guedj Gueye étudiant en agronomie, Ibrahima Seck étudiant en productions végétales et agronomiques, Tamsir Baye étudiant en sociologie, Dame Gaye polytechnicien, Penda Dia Juriste, Awa Ngom juriste,Jean Claude Badji agronome , Khaly Diop sociologue, Babacar Faye sociologue, Sidi Fall Agronome, Samba Cissé agronome.  

Diaspora

Daouda Sagne étudiant informatique Maroc

Nguekokh

Jules Souleymane Diallo Président JIF AFRIK  jeunesse interconnectée et fusionnée Afrik, Arfang Diedhou JIF Afrik, Nastou Goudiabi secrétaire, Abdoulaye Ba JIF Afrik, Alang Fatou Sene JIF Afrik, Seydina Fall géographe 

Thiès

Thierno Abdoul Wone écrivain membre fondateur du collectif des écrivains de la meute, Mame Faty Diop étudiante audiovisuel, Dieye Mame Mbeugué PASTEF, Ousmane Mangassa infographe.

Amadou Seck juriste d’affaire.

Sindia

Ndiasse Ndiaye jeunesse du PIT

Sendou

Martine Mback Yem gérante hôtel, Ngo Ngwet Mback barmaid, Anne Sophie Sarre Mbalilore trésorière

Yenne

Astou Ndiaye cuisinière

Ndangane

Pierre Mbar Diouf guide touristique

Louga

Cheikh Diouf Mbacké enseignant, Cheikh Tidiane Fall Rassemblement National Démocratique,

Mortalla Ba artiste peintre  

Ziguinchor

Aissatou Bodian prof  informatique, Hamidou Ba receveur des postes syndiqué SYNAP .

Dakar

Djibi Soumare Secrétaire Général du SYNAP syndicat de postiers, Cheikh Faye contrôleur poste syndiqué  SYNAP, Farba Diouf direction logistique poste syndiqué SYNAP, ,Abdou Rahmane Watt département juridique poste syndiqué SYNAP, El hadj Almareme agent de guichet poste UCAD,  Ndeye Isseu Ndiaye présidente de la fondation action pour la solidarité et l’union dans le monde ASUM,  Gnokhobay Diouf  dit paysan noir, Olivier Ndeye professeur, Sylvia Diedhou étudiante en journalisme, Samuel artiste peintre, Many Diedhou téléopératrice, Awa m’Baye Groupe Sénégalais Etudes Révolutionnaires, Nicole Gomis danseuse, Bruno Dione étudiant, Saliou Mbacké Lo gestionnaire UCAD, Aida Niang Bess du Niak , Léon Diouf professeur de math, Edouard Sarr prof de français, Souleymane Camara étudiant, Wally Faye prof histoire géo, Moussa Diallo étudiant, Kiné Ndiaye sans emploi, Mbaye Djongue étudiant, Amina Sow étudiante, Dany Diatta enseignante, Samba Aw sans emploi, Ahmadou Ndiaye sans emploi, Marcel Ndiaye prof GSER, Casimir Nzalé Professeur GSER, Charlemagne Diedhiou étudiant, Ambroise Gomis électricien, Albert Sylla assistant réalisateur, Souley Mbaye  caissier, Edvige Fatou Gomis employée hôtellerie, Mback Yem étudiant ressources humains, Jean Marie Nelson étudiant ressources humaines, Pierre Yem Mback étudiant en génie logiciel    

Kaolak

Affous Thiam étudiante en numérique agricole, Mounima Diallo élève infirmière, Hawo Sy commerçante, Hapsatou Berthe commerçante, Saly Ba commerçante.

Taiba Ndiaye

Assane Seck plombier  

CONTACT: gser senegal <gsersenegal21@gmail.com>