March for Women's Lives, Washington, D.C., April 25, 2004

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Tens of thousands march in Bilbao, the main city in Euskadi, the Basque country, in May 2003, to protest banning of Basque pro-independence party Herri Batasuna. The Spanish imperialist rulers have targeted Basques and immigrants from North Africa in their "antiterror" assaults on freedom of association and due process.

The Socialist Workers Party calls on workers, farmers, and youth to condemn Spanish imperialism’s offensive against the peoples of the Basque country and North Africa, an assault that is accelerating under the pretext of responding to the March 11 train bombings in Madrid.

Rationalizing their assault by demagogically naming opponents “ETA terrorists” and “Islamic extremists,” the Spanish rulers are whipping up bourgeois public opinion to step up assaults on the national aspirations of the people of Euskadi (the Basque country), the rights of North African immigrants, and the broader rights of workers and farmers throughout Spain.

For more than a century, Spanish imperialism has oppressed and exploited the peoples of Morocco, Western Sahara, and other parts of North Africa. Within the Spanish state, the ruling families governing from Madrid have brutally repressed the struggles of the Basque people for their right to national self-determination. Hundreds of Basque independence advocates remain locked up in Spanish and French prisons, while Herri Batasuna, one of the major Basque political parties, remains banned. The long record of brutality by the Spanish rulers has earned them the well-deserved hatred of millions around the world.

Today, seeking to advance the interests of Spanish finance capital, Madrid has deployed “peacekeeping” troops in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosova, Bosnia, and Djibouti as part of the imperialist occupation forces in those countries—under the banner of the United Nations, NATO, “the coalition of the willing,” or any combination of the above. This is on top of the longstanding Spanish colonial enclaves in Morocco, Ceuta and Melilla.

The call by the new social-democratic prime minister of Spain to put the thousands of foreign troops in Iraq under United Nations control instead of direct U.S. administration would change nothing about the character of the occupation. The Iraqi people already have abundant experience with the corruption and brutality of the UN in maintaining murderous economic sanctions against them for a decade, systematically laying the basis for the U.S.-led invasion last year. And working people from Korea to the Congo and beyond can testify to the true face of imperialist occupation carried out under the “command” of the blue helmets.

The pro-Spanish imperialist anti-Americanism promoted by the new social-democratic government, far from being “antiwar,” is a deadly prowar poison for working people. It is being used to politically hitch workers, farmers, and youth in Spain to the interests of their exploiters.

The notion that support to one or another of the world’s imperialist ruling classes, or to any wing of them, will somehow improve the position of working people—that it will provide immunity from the deepening and inescapable class battles that are accelerating—is an illusion. It is an illusion that damages the cause of the labor movement, national liberation struggles, defense of the Cuban Revolution, and all other battles for social justice.

Whether aligned with the wolves in Washington or the hyenas in Berlin, Paris, Rome, and Madrid, every imperialist power will continue to be driven toward wars of plunder and intensified exploitation by the desperate need to increase profit rates and edge out competitors—driven, that is, by the very workings of the capitalist system itself.

All the conflicts generated by imperialism’s march toward depression and war are sharpening today. From NATO’s escalating intervention in Kosova, to the U.S. and Pakistani offensive on the border with Afghanistan, to the U.S. military preparations for action against Venezuela—the pattern is evident.

At the same time, the capitalist rulers in the United States, Canada, France, Spain, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere are using the “global war on terrorism” as a pretext to step up their assault on the livelihoods and political rights of workers and farmers. In targeting the Basque struggle for self-determination and North African immigrants, the Spanish state has denied defendants the right to due process, curtailed freedom of assembly, and trampled on other basic rights.

Regardless of who organized the train bombings that killed more than 200 defenseless men, women, and children in Madrid—an action no class-conscious worker can support—one thing is certain: there will be no peace so long as the economic, social, and political world created by imperialism continues to exist. From the March 11 attacks in Madrid, to the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq, it is working people who will go to the wall every time.

On Sept. 11, 2001, in a statement I issued as the Socialist Workers Party candidate for mayor of New York, our campaign explained, “By its systematic superexploitation of the peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America; by its never-ending insults to their national and cultural dignity; by its ceaseless murderous violence in countless forms—U.S. imperialism is turning North America into a death trap for working people and all who live here.”

That statement remains true today. It remains true for every imperialist state. Through the horrors it has inflicted on working people and the oppressed around the world, imperialism has sowed the wind and it will reap the whirlwind. And the toilers will be the ones to suffer horribly.

Wars of conquest, economic dislocation and ruin, and assaults on human dignity will continue—until working people take power out of the hands of the capitalist ruling classes and establish their own rule, workers and farmers governments, everywhere. Among the first measures such a government in Spain would take today would be to grant the Basques and other oppressed peoples the right to self-determination. It would bring all the troops home immediately and withdraw from imperialist alliances such as NATO and the European Union.

There is much talk in bourgeois circles about “old Europe” and “new Europe,” referring to tactical rifts and growing economic and financial conflicts among the rival imperialist powers.

There is a “new Europe” being born, but it is not among the capitalist rulers of the continent. “New Europe” is being prepared by our class cousins—the working people of Europe and their allies. Those standing up and fighting the offensive of the bosses and their governments: from North African farm workers protesting racist attacks in Spain, to dairy farmers in Scotland demanding a living income, to Irish republicans fighting for an end to British rule, to workers and students resisting the assault on government health benefits, pensions, education, and other facets of the social wage they have won through past class battles.

Working people in the United States must demand that all imperialist troops be withdrawn now from Iraq, Afghanistan, Korea, Haiti, Guantánamo, the Balkans, and wherever else they may be. We must protest moves—from Washington to Madrid—to curb the political rights of working people and oppressed nationalities.

And we must stand alongside our class brothers and sisters and their allies in Europe and the world over. Because a new America is also being born—the America of workers and farmers who are in the front ranks of resistance to the employers’ assaults here at home.
 
 
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