Movement Agenda: NATO summit, RNC, DNC

May Day in the USA looks like it will be a great time to unite all sections of the working class.

You might ask, “Unite for what?”

Unite to pursue the class struggle on all fronts. The next battle comes up right away. It’s life and death. It involves confronting the imperialist war drive.

The movement is mobilizing because NATO is holding a summit on May 20-21 in Chicago. NATO must be stopped.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was — from 1949 until 1991 — a military conspiracy of the major imperialist countries in Western Europe and North America to crush whatever post-World War II workers’ revolutions might occur in Europe, while holding the Soviet Union at missile point.

By the end of 1991, the Soviet Union dissolved. So did its military alliance known as the Warsaw Pact. But not NATO.

Still under U.S. leadership, NATO was converted into a worldwide police force of the former colonial powers — except for Japan. In 2012 language, NATO is the armed agent of the worldwide 1%.

NATO has made three major military interventions since 1991. In one of them, far from Europe, the people of Afghanistan may have the final word and, through sheer determination and persistence, force out the well-armed occupiers after 11 years of the most uneven war.

But the other two cases satisfied the imperialists enough that they consider them “model” interventions: against Yugoslavia in 1995 and 1999 and against Libya in 2011. NATO destroyed these countries. The imperialists picked up the pieces as plunder. The casualties — among the imperialist armed forces — were so small that few people in the NATO countries thought about it enough to question the “humanitarian” pretext for the wars.

Now a similar NATO model is under consideration for imperialist intervention against Syria.

It is this possibility and the whole existence of NATO that is driving progressives to mobilize a major national protest in Chicago on May 20. The protest now includes the Occupy movement, labor and religious forces. For more information on May 20 in Chicago, see Cang8.org, nationalpeaceconference.org, or iacenter.org.

As part of building for the May 20 protest, Workers World Party has called a meeting in Chicago on the evening of May 17. It will be at the Electrical Workers union (UE) hall at 6:30 p.m. at 37 S. Ashland Ave. WWP First Secretary Larry Holmes will be among the speakers.

For us at Workers World, the demand in Chicago is simple: Abolish NATO!

Following the Chicago action, the movement will look ahead to the end of the summer to expose the reactionary and anti-working-class role of the two big U.S. capitalist parties at the Republican and Democratic national conventions.

The RNC is taking place in Tampa, Fla., with the protest against this reactionary, racist, anti-working-class, imperialist war-mongering party set for Aug. 27. (See marchonthernc.com.)

The DNC’s venue is Charlotte, N.C., home base of Bank of America and Wells Fargo and the second largest financial center in the country after New York. Protesters there have called for a “March on Wall Street South” during the DNC, Sept. 1-6. The Sept. 2 march will point out that the Democratic Party, no less than the Republican, represents the interests of the 1%. (See protestdnc.org.)

On May Day workers come out in struggle all over the world in an expression of international solidarity against the global 1%. The struggle to end imperialist wars and the capitalist governments that wage them is the next shoe dropping.