University of California, Berkeley students sponsored a conference on reparations in February that included some good talks by Fred Hampton Jr. and youth from Africa. The conference was focused on bringing the struggle for reparations to the Hip Hop generation, and the audience was largely high school and college students.
Fred Hampton Jr, Chairman of the Prisoners of Consciousness Committee (POCC), addressed the issue of terrorism in Amerika pointing to police terrorism in oppressed communities, land grabs by corporate interests and the largescale warehousing of oppressed in concentration camps. MIM agrees with Hampton's statement that we need to talk about the Original Victims of terrorism, and call it what it is. White amerika is still mourning a single event that took place 3 and half years ago, while oppressed communities have been threatened by police terrorism continuously, for generations. Hampton pointed out the hypocrisy of Amerikans who are sad about conditions overseas, like the recent tsunami in Asia, but who don't care about conditions of prisoners in the U.$. In practice, Hampton correctly works to build unity with other organizations without compromising the POCC principles. MIM calls this a United Front and it is an essential tool of revolutionary organizing that allows us to mobilize everyone who has an interest in opposing imperialism.
The morning panel included three speakers from countries in Africa, focusing on the need for debt relief in that continent, as a form of reparations. The speaker from South Africa, an activist with the Jubilee, movement noted that South Africa is paying 30% of the country's national budget just to service the interest on its $25 billion debt. (See MIM articles on this struggle against Third World debt and the Jubilee movement.) This debt comes from loans taken out by the Apartheid government which used the money to build their repressive government, and line their own pockets. Now the people of South Africa who suffered under the Apartheid regime are paying back the debt that helped build apartheid. This debt forgiveness is just one step towards reparations for the years of suffering to profit the white regime and their corporate backers.
A man from Burundi spoke about the need for real independence. He questioned the assertion by the imperialists and their neo-colonial puppets that Burundi could have independence when there exists large numbers of refugees and paramilitary killings continue. He described a neo-colonial situation in Burundi, where the white faces have left, but the colonizing mindset of the government has not. While the imperialists create conditions of what they call “ethnic conflict”, they are able to continue to control the local economy. Third World countries are forced to privatize social services to continue to receive funds from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB), which are currently pushing for privatized water in Burundi.
Over $300 billion in debt is owed by Africa, and "the countries are all servicing interest on debt instead of dealing with the needs of the people," a speaker from Zimbabwe stressed. He spoke of reparations as the just conclusion to the anti-colonial struggle that ended with a kiss and make up without any demands that europeans return what they had stolen from the people. This speaker explained how in Zimbabwe the borrowed money was largely used to combat problems that were a result of colonial robbery in the first place, like fighting disease and poverty. And amerikans wonder why Africans can’t just pull themselves up by their bootstraps. The speaker also noted that there was a huge accumulation of capital in the U.$. because of slavery. But even worse there were an estimated 100 million people who died in the creation of the slave system, and it is impossible to just write a check to cover the value of these lives. This young man also noted that Amerikan slavery was not just abolished, it changed its form into colonialism.
All speakers on this panel demanded 100% debt relief for Africa as a part of reparations. Several speakers noted that there is a precedent for reparations. For instance, the Germans paid reparations for years after the World War I. Yet Africans are being asked to forgive and forget decades of exploitation.
International finance capital benefits from the people's misery
Since the 1980s many Third World countries have taken out huge loans from the U.$., England, Japan, and other imperialist countries as well as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank (WB) which are essentially acting as banks run by the imperialists. These loans far exceeded the capacity of the countries to repay. As a result the interest and further loans taken out to pay back original loans have led to spiraling debt. Again, MIM argues that it is the imperialists who have stolen from the rest of the world that owe reparations. The majority of the world do not owe imperialists for loans taken out in efforts to rebuild from imperialist plunder.
About half the debt of Third World countries is owed directly to the imperialist governments of the U.$., Britain, Canada, France, Germany and Italy (the G7). Most of the rest is owed to the IMF and World Bank. About 10% is owed to private banks.
It is important to explain that loans have never been given to Third World countries out of the goodness of the hearts of the imperialist bankers. Instead, these loans are given for political and economic reasons. Supporting corrupt dictators by giving loans to prop up economic and military development that furthers the dictator's control while at the same time buying his or her allegiance to the foreign capitalists is very common.
MIM promotes the Maoist principles of foreign economic aid. The Chinese government under Mao had eight principles of foreign economic aid (from the Fundamentals of Political Economy):
Only with a socialist system in place where a dictatorship of the proletariat can enact policies in the interests of the people will it be possible to put these policies into place. Until that time the imperialists will continue their attempts to plunder the resources and labor of the majority of the world's people. But sometimes we can force concessions from the imperialists along the road to socialism. MIM supports the struggle to force the imperialists to relieve the debt burden of the Third World as a first step towards reparations for the oppressed people of the world.
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