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Vol. 72/No. 7      February 18, 2008

 
Closing the world energy gap
(editorial)
 
The power failures that have recently gripped China, South Africa, Argentina, and other nations bring into sharp relief the huge inequalities in access to electricity between imperialist and semicolonial countries, and between classes within those countries. The disparities in economic infrastructure and development, reproduced every day by the workings of capitalism, can only widen as the U.S. ruling families and their imperialist rivals in Europe and the Pacific compete for markets.

Electrification is a fundamental precondition for developing modern industry and agriculture, as well as access to culture. Yet there is a huge gap in the world. The imperialist countries, with only 14 percent of the world’s population, consume 60 percent of the electricity. Meanwhile, sub-Saharan Africa accounts for 9 percent of the global population but only 1 percent of electricity usage. In Pakistan, more than 40 percent of the people have no power, and in Nepal, the figure is more than 90 percent. As always, it is the workers and farmers who bear the brunt of this crisis.

Washington and other imperialist powers are all too quick to offer loans to governments of semicolonial nations in return for hefty interest payments and increased exploitation of their resources and labor. But when it comes to real aid that could qualitatively increase the productivity of labor in these countries and make them less dependent on the advanced capitalist countries, the imperialists will block that—and anything that jeopardizes their opportunity to exploit and profit.

They arrogantly deny the semicolonial world the right to take whatever measures necessary—including the development of nuclear power—to meet their energy needs. They claim industrial growth for these nations “wastes” scarce resources, pollutes too much, or causes “global warming.” In a similar way, workers in the industrialized countries are told we should drive our cars less, turn off the lights more, and turn down the heat so “we” can “save energy.” But that is a false “we.” There are workers and farmers of the world who produce the wealth, on the one side—the real us—and the landlords and capitalists who appropriate that wealth for their own benefit, on the other.

The labor movement should support the efforts of nations oppressed by imperialism to acquire and develop the energy sources needed to bring much of humanity out of darkness, including nuclear power. We should champion the cancellation of the Third World debt and the lifting of all U.S. tariffs and “anti-dumping,” “fair labor,” and “environmental protection” regulations, which reinforce the world inequalities in trade.

After the 1917 Russian revolution, working people in that country embarked on a campaign to spread electrification throughout the country, to close the gap between city and countryside and strengthen the alliance of workers and peasants. Workers did the same after the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Today, 95 percent of the population in Cuba has access to electricity and the revolutionary government is extending its availability further.

The toilers in Russia and Cuba were able to accomplish this because they had taken political power out of the hands of the landlords and capitalists and formed their own government. That’s what’s needed today the world over.
 
 
Related articles:
Blackouts in China, S. Africa highlight energy gap in world  
 
 
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