It also points to the need to accelerate the work of building proletarian parties capable of leading workers and peasants to take and hold state power. This can open the road to socialist revolution, when joyful moments like those of the proclamation of the popular assembly in Guayaquil arrive.

Like most of the semicolonial world, Ecuador's working people are squeezed by a ballooning foreign debt on top of exploitation by local rulers. Moreover, what is happening to toilers in Ecuador—where only a third of the work force is regularly employed, rampant inflation is devouring paychecks, and blanket discrimination against the indigenous people is becoming an intolerable affront to human dignity—is not exceptional. It is just one variant of the future facing every country held in economic bondage to world finance capital.

During the last U.S. presidential election, Albert Gore bragged that the massive loans the White House arranged to shore up the Mexican economy after the collapse of the peso the previous year were a big success for Wall Street and Washington: not only were the loans and the interest paid off, but the U.S. rulers made an additional handsome profit of $500 million in the process. To do that, the ruling class in Mexico imposed harsh austerity, slashing the living standards of most working people 40 to 50 percent. "There should have been a revolution, but there was barely a demonstration!" New York Times liberal columnist Thomas Friedman boasted.

As the current cyclical economic expansion in the United States has entered its ninth year, many capitalist politicians and pundits seem to have similar illusions about much of the semicolonial world—and the United States as well. But as the events in Ecuador reveal, the grinding conditions facing working people will foster not only demonstrations but revolutionary action.

That is the common thread between the explosion of popular anger in Ecuador and the almost simultaneous outpouring of tens of thousands of workers and farmers in Columbia, South Carolina, last week. The capitalist system, in its latest and final stage of imperialism, has wrought not only devastation, but has brought into being a large and potentially powerful working class, and its proletarian allies on the land, with enormous capacities and willingness to fight.

As the events in Ecuador and South Carolina show, the future capitalism has in store for working people is not inevitable. It can be changed by the timely solidarity, courageous action, and united struggle of workers and farmers conscious of their power to transform the world. Thousands of fighters are open to that perspective and to the need for a revolutionary program and organization that can make that possibility a reality.  
 
 
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