[News] We Dance into the New Year Banging Our Hammers and Swinging Our Sickles
Anti-Imperialist News
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Thu Dec 30 11:23:09 EST 2021
We Dance into the New Year Banging Our Hammers and Swinging Our Sickles:
The Fifty-Second Newsletter (2021)
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*We Dance into the New Year Banging Our Hammers and Swinging Our
Sickles: The Fifty-Second Newsletter (2021)*
P.S. Jalaja (India), We Surely Can Change the World, 2021.
P.S. Jalaja (India), /We Surely Can Change the World/, 2021.
Dear friends,
Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
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Bittersweet is the passage of this year. There have been some immense
victories and some catastrophic defeats, the most terrible being the
failure of the Global North countries to adopt a democratic attitude
towards confronting the COVID-19 pandemic and creating equitable access
to key resources, from life-saving medical equipment to vaccines.
Tragically, by the end of this pandemic, we will have learnt the Greek
alphabet from the variants
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named after its letters (Delta, Omicron), which continue to emerge.
Cuba leads
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the world with the highest vaccination rates, using its indigenous
vaccines
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to protect its population as well as those of countries from Venezuela
to Vietnam, following a long history of medical solidarity. The
countries with the lowest vaccination rates
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– currently led by Burundi, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti,
South Sudan, Chad, and Yemen – are amongst the poorest in the world,
reliant on foreign aid since their resources are essentially stolen,
such as by being acquired at outrageously low prices by multinational
companies. With 0.04% of Burundi’s 12 million people vaccinated as of 15
December 2021, at its current rate
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of vaccination the country would only achieve 70% coverage by January 2111.
In May 2021, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the World Health
Organisation, said
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that ‘the world is in vaccine apartheid’. Little has changed since then.
In late November, the African Union’s vaccine delivery co-chair Dr
Ayoade Alakija said
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of the emergence of Omicron in southern Africa, ‘What is going on right
now is inevitable. It’s a result of the world’s failure to vaccinate in
an equitable, urgent, and speedy manner. It is as a result of hoarding
[vaccines] by high-income countries of the world, and quite frankly it
is unacceptable’. In mid-December, Ghebreyesus appointed Alakija as the
WHO Special Envoy for the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator. Her task
is not easy, and her goal will only be met if, as she put it
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‘a life in Mumbai matters as much as in Brussels, if a life in São Paulo
matters as much as a life in Geneva, and if a life in Harare matters as
much as in Washington DC’.
Addis Gezehagn (Ethiopia), Floating City XVIII, 2020.
Addis Gezehagn (Ethiopia), /Floating City XVIII/, 2020.
Vaccine apartheid is a part of a broader problem of medical apartheid,
one of the four apartheids
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of our time, the others being food apartheid, money apartheid, and
education apartheid. A new report by the UN’s Food and Agriculture
Organisation says
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that the population of undernourished people in Africa has increased by
89.1 million since 2014, reaching 281.6 million in 2020. It is
worthwhile to consider Dr Alakija’s question about humanity, about the
worth assigned to different human beings: can a life in Harare be valued
as much as a life in Washington DC? Can we, as a people, overcome these
apartheids and solve the elementary problems that are faced by the
people of our planet and end the barbarous ways in which the current
economic and political system tortures humankind and nature?
A question like that sounds naïve to those who have forgotten what it
means to believe in something – if not in the idea of humanity itself,
then at least in the binding United Nations Charter
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(1945) and the partly binding UN Declaration of Human Rights
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(1948). The Declaration calls upon us as a people to commit to upholding
each other’s ‘inherent dignity’, a standard that has collapsed in the
years since heads of governments signed onto the final text.
Nougat, The Sniper of Kaya, 2021, courtesy of BreakThrough News.
Nougat, /The Sniper of Kaya/, 2021, courtesy of BreakThrough News.
Despite these apartheids, several advances for humankind are worth
highlighting:
1. The Chinese people eradicated extreme poverty, with nearly
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100 million people lifting themselves out of absolute misery over
the past eight years. Our first study
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in the series ‘Studies in Socialist Construction’, entitled /Serve
the People: The Eradication of Extreme Poverty in China/, details
how this remarkable feat was achieved.
2. Indian farmers bravely fought for the repeal of three laws which
threatened to uberise their working conditions, and – after a year
of struggle – they prevailed. This is the most significant labour
victory in many years. Our June dossier
<https://leftword.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=1bd0c2bfc6&e=d206d0a40d>,
/The Farmers’ Revolt in India,/ catalogued the struggle over land in
India and the farmers’ militancy over the past decade.
3. Left governments came to power in Bolivia, Chile, and Honduras,
overturning a history of coups and regime changes in these countries
that run from 1973 (Chile
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to 2009 (Honduras
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to 2019 (Bolivia
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A year ago, our January dossier
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/Twilight/, considered the erosion of US control over global affairs
and the emergence of a multipolar world. The failure of the United
States to attain its objectives in these countries and to overthrow
the Cuban Revolution and the Venezuelan revolutionary process
through hybrid wars
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is a sign of great possibility for people in the American
hemisphere. Trends show that in 2022, Lula da Silva will defeat
whoever is the right’s candidate in Brazil, ending the atrocity of
Jair Bolsonaro’s governance. Our May dossier
<https://leftword.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=6c56fea2ea&e=d206d0a40d>,
/The Challenges Facing Brazil’s Left,/ is a good place to read up on
the political dilemmas in Latin America’s largest country.
4. A rising tide of anger on the African continent against the
increasing military presence of the United States and France found
expression in the town of Kaya in the western part of Burkina Faso.
When a French military convoy drove near the town in November, a
crowd of demonstrators stopped it. At that point, the French
launched a surveillance drone to monitor the crowd. Aliou Sawadogo
(age 13) shot down the drone with his slingshot, ‘a Burkinabé David
against the French Goliath’, wrote
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Jeune Afrique. Our July dossier
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/Defending Our Sovereignty: US Military Bases in Africa and the
Future of African Unity, /was co-published with the Socialist
Movement of Ghana’s Research Group and tracks the growth of the
Western military presence on the continent.
5. We have seen strikes
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by care workers of all kinds across the world, from health workers
to domestic workers. These workers have been hit hard by the cruelty
of neoliberalism and by what we have called CoronaShock
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But these workers have refused to cower, refused to surrender their
dignity. Our March dossier
<https://leftword.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=aa62308518&e=d206d0a40d>,
/Uncovering the Crisis: Care Work in the Time of Coronavirus/,
provides a map of the pressures weighing on these workers and opens
a window into their struggles.
Harrison Forman (US), Afghanistan, men surrounding storyteller in K abul
market, 1953.
Harrison Forman (US), /Afghanistan, men surrounding storyteller in
K//abul market/, 1953.
Of course, this is not an exhaustive list. These are merely some of the
benchmarks of progress. Not every advance is clear-cut. After twenty
years, the United States was forced to finally withdraw
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from Afghanistan as it lost the war to the Taliban. None of the United
States’ aims for its war seem to have been attained, and yet it
continues to threaten this country of close to 39 million people with
starvation. The United States has prevented
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Afghanistan from accessing its $9.5 billion in external reserves that
sit in US banks, and it has prevented Afghanistan’s government from
taking its place in the UN system. As a consequence of the collapse of
foreign aid, which accounted
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for 43% of Afghanistan’s GDP last year, the UN Development Programme
calculates
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that the country’s GDP will fall by 20% this year and then by 30% in
subsequent years. Meanwhile, the UN report estimates that by 2022, the
country’s per capita income may decline to nearly half of 2012 levels.
It is estimated
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that 97% of the population of Afghanistan will fall below the poverty
line, with mass starvation a real possibility this winter. A life in the
Wakhan Corridor is not valued as much as a life in London. The ‘inherent
dignity’ of the human being – as the UN Declaration puts it – is not upheld.
This is not merely an Afghanistan matter. The newly released World
Inequality Report 2022 shows
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that the poorest half of the world’s people owned merely 2% of the total
private property (business and financial assets, net of debt, real
estate), while the richest 10% owned 76% of the total private property.
Gender inequality shapes
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these numbers, since women received
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barely 35% of labour income compared to men who received 65% (a slight
improvement over 1990 figures, when women’s share was 31%). This
inequality is another way of measuring the differential dignity afforded
to people along class lines and along the hierarchies of gender and
nationality.
In 1959, the Iranian communist poet Siavash Kasra’i wrote one of his
elegies, /Arash-e Kamangir /(‘Arash the Archer’). Using the popular
mythology of the ancient battle fought by the heroic archer Arash to
liberate his country, Kasra’i depicts the anti-imperialist struggles of
his time. But the poem is not only about struggles, for we also wonder
about possibilities:
I told you life is beautiful.
Told and untold, there is a lot here.
The clear sky;
The golden sun;
The flower gardens;
The boundless plains;
The flowers peeping up through the snow;
The tender swing of fish dancing in crystal of water;
The scent of rain-swept dust on the mountainside;
The sleep of wheat fields in the spring of moonlight;
To come, to go, to run;
To love;
To lament for humankind;
And to revel arm-in-arm with the crowd’s joys.
Warmest of wishes for a revolutionary 2022,
Vijay
Website <www.eltricontinental.org>
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