What a "surprise" it is for them to "learn," as U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers and officials of the Inter-American Development Bank did in New Orleans recently, that the gap in income and wages and the percentage of the population living in poverty has remained unchanged in two decades. They expressed worries over these facts--not for the human misery caused by capitalist exploitation and imperialist plunder, but exactly because the rising struggles and instability unfolding in the region threaten imperialism.

In Ecuador, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Brazil, and elsewhere, workers and peasants are joining together to prevent themselves from being pushed over the very precipice of existence. Many, as in Ecuador and Bolivia, are seizing government buildings and facing down shows of force by police and military units deployed against them. Social polarization is deepening, giving every government, even ones with a "popular" mandate, only a temporary existence.

The continental breadth of the actions, their size and militancy, and the fact that this is not the ebbing of a tide of struggle but the coming forward of those waters, should give fighters, unionists, and young people in North America the opposite reaction to that of Summers and his class.

What is stunning is the manifestation of what capitalism and imperialism in Latin American has brought into being: not victims, but tens of millions of workers in the cities, allied with peasants in every country, who have economic and social power greater than their class enemies arrayed against them. They are clearly fighting the same enemy as workers and farmers in North America, and are allies in a common struggle.

It is one reason why the Cuban revolution stands out today as a mortal enemy of imperialism. The fact that a socialist revolution exists in the Caribbean and Latin America shows a different course for those hundred of millions throughout the hemisphere. It is a threat to the U.S. empire and the neocolonial regimes across the continent. It shows that fighting to replace the capitalist government with one of workers and farmers, and charting a road toward the construction of socialism, is not only a good idea, but is something that is both necessary and possible to do.  
 
 
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